Virginia Woolf

by Gillian Gill

  Within a year or so, Vita was taking long trips abroad with her rich old friend Dorothy Wellesley, and then, to her husband’s relief and Mrs. Wellesley’s chagrin, Vita went blithely and unapologetically on to her next conquest, Hilda Matheson of the BBC. Virginia was jealous and hurt and clingy for some time, but she took counsel and amusement from the in-depth analysis of the complications of lesbian society provided by Ethel Smyth, a doyenne of the “Sapphic” scene both in England and in France.

  And if Vita Sackville-West had failed to give Virginia Woolf orgasms, she did something more important—she sparked Woolf’s period of greatest creativity. It was in the course of her intimate friendship with Vita that Woolf produced what many consider her masterpieces—To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and A Room of One’s Own. Orlando, with a protagonist who ranges through history and across continents and changes from man to woman in different historical eras, has become a classic of queer literature, especially since Sally Potter’s extraordinary 1992 movie starring Tilda Swinton. For the first Hogarth Press edition of the novel, Vita Sackville-West posed for photographs in costume, and when she finally received her inscribed copy, she was both furious at what her friend Virginia had dared to “make up” of her and cognizant that this was a supreme love letter.

  Professionally, Vita Sackville-West came through for the Woolfs. She was a prize-winning poet and a novelist who sold far more copies than Virginia, and publishing some of her prose work with the Hogarth Press was a coup for Virginia and Leonard. Vita’s novel The Edwardians, published by the Hogarth Press in 1930, was a bestseller and put Leonard’s account book solidly in the black for the first time.

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  Beloved within the English lesbian community was Ellen Terry, the famous actress whose unconventional yet thoroughly Victorian career included a succession of wildly acclaimed theatrical performances, a couple of undistinguished husbands, two flamboyant male lovers, two illegitimate children, and a damehood. Ellen Terry fascinated Virginia Woolf, since, as we know from Woolf’s skit “Freshwater” (discussed in Chapter 2), Terry was part of the Pattle family lore of Virginia’s mother. Woolf wrote a kind review of Terry’s rather disjointed autobiography when it came out, and decades later, as she notes in a letter to Ethel Smyth on January 24, 1934, she enjoyed the edition of Terry’s correspondence with George Bernard Shaw prepared by Edy Craig and Christopher St. John. She was less enthusiastic about the 1932 Memoirs of Ellen Terry put out by the same team. Woolf could easily have met Terry, who died in 1928. It was not until 1933, however, that Woolf visited Smallhythe Place, the rambling collection of Tudor buildings that Terry had managed to buy and where she lived her last years, surrounded by a loving, protective, creative, fiercely feminist group of women.

  Chief among those women was Terry’s daughter “Edy”—Edith Ailsa Geraldine Craig (1869–1947)—a director, playwright, and costumier to whom Woolf was introduced socially by Vita Sackville-West. Vita’s Sissinghurst home was just eight miles from Smallhythe. Edy and her two closest companions, Christopher St. John (born Cristabel Marshall) and Clare (Tony) Atwell, were leaders of the radical, bohemian wing of the English lesbian community between the wars. Unlike aristocratic “Sapphists” (to use Woolf’s preferred term) such as Vita Sackville-West, Dorothy Wellesley, Violet Keppel Trefusis, and Una Troubridge, the Smallhythe group inherited no trust funds; took no husbands; dressed for comfort, not fashion, often in the sturdy garb associated with men; and struggled to support themselves with their writing, their art, and their theatrical projects.

  Edy Craig and Virginia Woolf were never friends, though both were good friends of Ethel Smyth, whose operas brought her into Craig’s theatrical world. As early as 1922 Woolf was attending the rehearsal of a play by her friend Beatrice Mayor, which was being put on in London by Craig’s pioneering women’s theater group, the Playwrights Theatre, and directed by Craig herself. In the diary entry of March 30, Woolf describes “Miss Craig,” “a rosy, ruddy personage in white waistcoat, with black bow tie and gold chain loosely knotted,” and she savors “the supple, candid, free and easy good sense of the theatrical manners” as interpreted by Edy Craig.

  This rehearsal was to bear fruit many years later. In Between the Acts, the novel left in draft when she died, Woolf imagines a musical pageant celebrating English history staged in the garden of a big house in southern England. The play is written and directed by Miss Latrobe, and, as she is the first to realize, it is less than a success, even by local village standards. After the audience and the players have departed, Miss Latrobe (Virginia Woolf never gives her a first name) emerges from behind the tree where she has watched the whole shambolic performance. Shouldering the heavy case of records used in the performance, unable to face the evening alone in her cottage (her actress partner, Woolf tells us, has left her), Miss Latrobe repairs to the local pub to drown her theatrical sorrows alongside men who have only contempt for her and her kind. If only the actors “had known their parts,” she muses over a glass of beer, if only the audience “had understood her meaning,” if only “the pearls had been real and the funds illimitable,” perhaps “her gift” might have been recognized.

  But live theater is essentially a transitory art, its glory fleeting, its failures forgotten, and in her fatigue and disappointment Miss Latrobe is already thinking of her next production. “She put down her case and stood looking at the land. Then something rose to the surface. ‘I should group them here,’ she murmured, ‘here.’ It would be midnight; there would be two figures, half concealed by a rock. The curtain would rise. What would the first words be?” By the last pages of the novel, she has found those first words.

  Miss Latrobe is not a portrait of Edy Craig. Craig lived in the shadow of her extraordinary mother, but she inherited no small measure of the love, respect, and admiration that Dame Ellen earned, and she was never alone. After the death of her mother, Craig lived in a community of like-minded women. Equally, the pageant that Woolf evokes in the novel is not A Pageant of Great Women, Edith Craig’s most successful work, in which Woman is pitted against Prejudice. That said, in its urgency as much as in its arguments, Craig’s modern morality play was clearly an influential text for Woolf as she came to write her own feminist polemic, A Room of One’s Own.

  But in choosing to end her last novel with a woman theater director who is quietly but clearly identified as lesbian, Woolf was not only paying tribute to Edith Craig and the pioneer theater group she led, which is only now receiving the attention it deserves. Woolf was also suggesting that Miss Latrobe and her pageant could be symbolic of England in the early years of World War II. The cultured, leisured county society that Woolf conjured up in her novel was, she knew, a lighthearted farce between two great tragedies, and by 1940 it was as much a thing of the past as Alfred and the cakes and good Queen Bess. Hitler, with his blitzkrieg and his concentration camps, had put an end to the Sussex world where Virginia and Leonard had created their haven of peace and contentment and collaboration, and the vast sadistic insanity of the real world was not only bombing Virginia’s London home but breaking through her fragile mental defenses.

  Soon she would be overrun, but while she could still think and write Woolf imagined a pageant in which a small, unremarkable English village community comes together to reenact great moments of its national past and does it very badly—just as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had done with the “Peace for Our Time” he negotiated in 1939 with Adolf Hitler. But square, bossy, pragmatic, visionary, unappreciated Miss Latrobe recognizes failure with a sigh as Britain did after the disaster and triumph of Dunkirk, and she quickly moves on to her next production, irrationally sure that she has a gift and the world, in some small way, will be the better for it. And though Woolf did not live to see it, Britain did not give up hope and did in the end struggle through to victory.

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  Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West remained friends and professional colleagues to the end, meeting occasionally for delectable lunche
s and exchanging affectionate letters. But just as Virginia knew quite well that Vita would never leave Harold, for her or any other woman, so Vita knew that Virginia would never leave Leonard. Even at the height of their love affair, when the two women went on vacation together in France, after a couple of weeks of writing to Leonard every day, Virginia could not wait to get back home. Vita was fascinating, exciting, wondrous, and in Orlando, Woolf celebrated her lover and friend in a way that the twenty-first century has found inspirational. But her attraction to people, men and women, was always, in Woolf’s own words, “spiritual, intellectual, emotional,” and once she drilled down into Vita’s mind, she was disappointed, even bored. Vita simply did not stand comparison with Leonard.

  Virginia Woolf knew that, in her husband, she had by rare good fortune come upon a friend, a partner, an intellectual equal, the best companion, the person in the world who most shared her values and who most valued her ideas. The Woolfs had what the Greeks called homophrosyne, a sharing of mind, and they worked as a team. When they started the Hogarth Press with a cheap, dysfunctional little printing machine, she set the type and he pulled the handle. When their publishing enterprise took off, they ran it together and shared in the profits.

  Leonard Woolf was certainly not a perfect man. He was a workaholic, and at times, the pace of the treadmill Leonard had strapped himself to brought him close to nervous collapse. Never an easy man, he would become irrationally stingy, dogmatic, pettifogging, and demanding. People at the Hogarth Press like John Lehmann knew to keep clear of the boss when he fiddled obsessively with stray bits of string to conceal the quickening tremor in his hands. If Virginia was a manic-depressive with regular suicidal impulses, Leonard was a chronic functional depressive. Downhill All the Way, his title for the final volume of his autobiography, is shorthand for the way he saw life. But, as he said many times, Leonard’s love with Virginia was the beacon that lit up the darkness of his life. In his proposal letter Leonard had sworn to love and protect Virginia always, and he was as good as his word. Keeping his wife alive was in part how he avoided suicide himself.

  In her marriage, as in so many other ways, Virginia Woolf broke ground and achieved success. Given the obstacles that stood in the way, the happiness she felt and gave is remarkable. As she says over and over again in her letters and diaries, she loved Leonard, cared for him, relied on him, missed him when he went away, was happy when he came back, knew that to him she was incomparable. Over the Woolfs’ thirty-year marriage, trust, affection, commitment, physical intimacy, and shared values proved more important than desire and orgasm—to both of them. That such things could not in the end prevail against her mental illness was their tragedy.

  When Virginia Woolf was fifty-nine, her disease, whatever we label it, got the better of her. Diseases do that in the end, for all of us. At a time of national catastrophe, her London home blown to pieces by a German bomb, facing the very real prospect that, if the Nazis invaded, she and her Jewish husband would be consigned to an English Auschwitz, Woolf was overtaxed, physically as well as mentally. She knew she was once more descending into madness and felt that, in such perilous times, caring for her was a burden her husband, family, and friends should not have to bear. So she kept hold of sanity while it was hers and chose death.

  She put on her old coat, went out to the cold little lodge where she did her writing, and wrote her last letter to Leonard. It begins: “Dearest, I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that. But I know I am wasting your life. It is this madness.”

  Then she walked out the back gate, past the church, and down to the river Ouse, which was running high. She put a large stone in her pocket and walked into the icy, swift-flowing water.

  Epilogue:

  The Bell Children and Their Aunt

  TO HER lasting sorrow, Virginia Woolf had no children, but she had books that have stood the test of time, a husband who guarded her estate, and heirs to carry her legacy forward. Woolf was a marvelous aunt. These excerpts from her letters illustrate the exuberant love, the intelligent sympathy, and the zany humor she lavished on them when she got the chance. To nineteen-year-old Quentin, who had written to her from Cassis and whose literary flair she presciently diagnosed, she wrote on May 11, 1929, “Dearest Quentin—oh, but you’re Claudian . . . How you have seduced me by the charm of your language. I have thrown to the floor the last page of my most hated book, it is as dry as a captains biscuit . . . and turned to this succulent sheet . . . How could I write to you when you were at Cassis and every page was left in the drawing room to be read by Clive Angelica Duncan Sabine Miss Campbell and Colonel Teed?”

  To twelve-year-old Angelica, who had written to inquire about the new litter of puppies the Woolfs’ dog Pinka was expecting, Virginia wrote in June a year later, “Darling Angelica, What a treat to get your letter! . . . How I wish I could sew like you and Mummy . . . When you come and stay at Rodmell will you give me lessons? Pinka sat on one of the puppies so there are only five—four daughters and one son, all coal black . . . we are going to call one Sheba. The son will be called Othello . . . Oh dear how I wish you would run in now and then we could have some pranks with the sugar . . . Love from Pinka, Sheba, Othello, Leonardo.”

  She signed herself to Angelica simply “Jinny.”

  For her Bell nephews and niece, Woolf loved to play the crazy aunt, but they knew they had a national treasure in her, and after her death they set out to repay all her kindnesses and offered paeans to her complicated character. In their writings about Bloomsbury—notably Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury Recalled, and Deceived with Kindness—Quentin Bell and Angelica Bell Garnett do something quite remarkable. They write books their publisher aunt would have been proud to put into print and paragraphs that their writer aunt would have been happy to pen. And let us not forget that Anne Olivier Bell, Quentin’s wife, devoted decades of her life to editing Virginia Woolf’s diary, displaying a scholarly precision and a delicacy of taste Woolf the reviewer would have praised. It is not fanciful to date the reemergence of Virginia Woolf as a major literary and intellectual figure to the 1972 publication of Quentin Bell’s carefully researched and documented, finely reasoned, deeply personal biography. Clear, witty, observant, cultured, masters of the art of telling a good story while getting the facts, Quentin and Angelica reveal themselves the worthy heirs of Virginia Woolf.

  Of Bloomsbury as a group, Quentin and Angelica have much to say, much of it charming, but of their parents—Vanessa and Clive and Duncan—they use humorous and whimsical anecdotes to offer an unacknowledged indictment. Virginia Woolf in her diary had gone out of her way to protect her sister, to present Vanessa in as flattering a light as possible. Angelica Bell Garnett especially does the opposite. She tells a compelling story of how her mother, watched by both her fathers, ruined her childhood and then stood back and let her husband ruin her adulthood. Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood is not an exercise in scholarly biography like her brother’s Virginia Woolf. It is an anguished cri de coeur, and it does not have the last word, but no one has taken an ax to the legend of Bloomsbury as Angelica Garnett did.

  As I was reading for this book, I became aware of a little vein of sadism running through the history of Bloomsbury. I don’t mean adult, negotiated sadomasochism as practiced by Lytton Strachey and Roger Senhouse, but casual, unacknowledged acts of cruelty, which only Virginia and Leonard Woolf appeared to notice. Not by chance was it to Virginia Woolf that Roger Fry talked about the everyday bloody beatings he had been forced to assist in at his prep school, to Virginia that an anguished Rupert Brooke wrote about the hideous affair of a small choirboy being gang-raped by older boys during evensong. Not by chance was it Leonard Woolf, in his comical party costume, who, as we saw in the last chapter, spoke up to the policeman in defense of a prostitute.

  In his final meditation on Bloomsbury as an old man, Quentin Bell details, without judgment, the casual sadism t
o which he was introduced as a very young man. He tells of the ghastly night when George Bergen, Duncan’s latest lover, took him out on a wild toot with a group of homosexual prostitutes he found repulsive—and then tried to proposition him within Duncan’s hearing. Worse yet, Quentin tells the story of how, as a special treat when he was a teenager, he was taken by his father, Clive Bell, to lunch at a villa at St. Cloud. There Quentin was offered his first cocktail, and when their host, a little man with lovely brown eyes, played a record of “Chinese music,” Quentin and his father sat and listened. “The music consisted,” writes Quentin Bell, “of a Chinese woman uttering fearful shrieks; the little man explained that the woman’s long fingers were stretched between two tables; as someone broke them with a mallet, each finger produced a shriek.” The “little man” was Pablo Picasso, and such was Quentin’s pleasure in being treated as a sophisticated adult by his father and such his awe at being in the company of a giant of the art world that, he tells us, he found horror “an inappropriate emotion.”

  While I was researching this book on Virginia Woolf, I had an emotion that I refused to dismiss as inappropriate, and it too related to Clive Bell, the husband Vanessa Bell never found it useful to divorce, the biological father of Julian and Quentin, and the man Angelica for eighteen years believed was her father.

  Sitting in the library at Trinity College, Cambridge, one day in 2017 and waiting for my host to come and collect me, I idly started to flip through a collection of dirty postcards belonging to Clive Bell. Apparently no rich American collectors had found the postcards interesting enough to purchase, so Bell’s heirs had given them to his old college. I myself was ready to dismiss the collection as icky but harmless (topless young women being fondled by mustachioed Edwardian blokes) until I came upon a sequence of three commercially produced postcards with photographs of a very small girl preparing to take a bath. The cards feature rhymed captions full of sexual double-entendres.