“We look in the looking glass to see ourselves. But we do so—I say again—vainly. For what is vanity but action in vain, ineffectual, a mistake, the primate’s blunder of taking the beguiling silver surface for the thing itself. We reduce the wonder of ourselves and the universe to two dimensions, an ape, or a silly little girl, primping before a plane of glass.”
Leonard is beaming. The thrill of her mind never loses its power to beguile. Yet he is struck by the predominance of her vanity in all this, though he knows that he should not be struck at all, since vanity is one of the traits in her that is most familiar and entrenched. It played its vital role in the subtext of this exchange.
And yet, he marvels, look how she plays it. For all her flaws and failings, all the hardships of staying by and righting her, there is this: She knows herself. She knows that she is vain. What’s more, she has turned the awareness on itself. She is making art of it—and science and metaphysics, too. Talking with her this way ameliorates everything. Without bodies, it is how they make love.
“But surely,” he exclaims with uncurbed relish, “you concede that Joyce at least broke through all this primitive realism. Ulysses is nothing if not a reinvention of the novel, and a complete break with the past? Even Tom Eliot was awed by it, you remember. He claimed that the book single-handedly destroyed the whole of the nineteenth century. And do you know, just repeating that now, I wonder again if we were perhaps foolish to decline Ulysses for the press when we had the chance.”
“We had good reasons, you may remember,” she chides. “The length, for one. You might also remember that at the time, in response to Tom’s fulminating praise of Lord Joyce, I said I thought the man a he-goat and, in the context of the present conversation, I would add, every bit as irritatingly priapic as Dr. Freud.”
“Oh, come now,” Leonard cries. “You cannot possibly dismiss Joyce so crudely, and you know it. Yielding so utterly to this obsession with the distastefulness of the male sex—well, I can only repeat, it isn’t worthy of you. It belies even your own more considered assessments of Joyce’s work.”
“Yes. Yes. All right,” she concedes, chagrined to be caught carping. “Joyce is unquestionably brilliant, has written many gorgeous and deeply satisfying passages, and he has, as you suggest, been reaching into consciousness as I have. But in these bold and flashing forays he is constantly pulled down by—I am sorry to have to say it—his typically male adolescent urges, which have persisted, as they so often do, in the grown man. They show themselves not only in the book’s relentless vulgarity, but also in its exhibitionism. He comes across as a clever schoolboy showing off, jumping up and down and waving his arms: Look at me! Look what I can do! And so, sadly, we do look at him, rather than at the cosmic wonder to which he is attempting to point.”
“I think he more than attempts,” Leonard scoffs, letting himself be drawn in. “As shrewd a critic as you are, Virginia, I don’t think that even you can contend that your assessment in this case is quite free of a certain taint.”
He regrets this the moment he says it.
“A certain taint of what?” she snaps.
“You know very well of what.”
“I’d like to hear you say it.”
“Very well, then,” he shouts, intending to pounce, but his dread gets the better of him and he merely stammers out the rest. “The taint of—well, of what? Well, shall we say, of professional insecurity?”
There is a tense pause, but this is a much less painful swipe than she had expected, and her answer is surprisingly subdued.
“Now that is unworthy of you.”
“I hardly think so,” he replies, too quickly. “I don’t say you are wrong in your assessment. In fact, as you are all too aware, I, and many others, consider you to be an extremely astute literary critic.”
Virginia has been standing in the same position throughout this exchange, holding her rolled cigarette unlit, as if threatening to stalk off with it in a huff, but now, having procured Leonard’s defeat, she lights it.
“I agree wholeheartedly,” he continues, hating himself, “with most of what you have ever said about any book, including Ulysses. But when you speak of Joyce you cannot possibly pretend to be objective. The matter and the man are too close. It was very much the same not long ago with Katherine Mansfield, and if she were still with us, the conflict would still be with us, too. Joyce is, as Katherine once was, a writer who is both an immediate contemporary and—you must admit it—a competitor?”
“I don’t admit it,” she roars, exhaling an avalanche of smoke. “And I forbid you to speak of Katherine. That conflict, as you call it, was as deeply personal—no, more so than it was professional. And regardless, with what I accomplished in Dalloway, I left Katherine behind once and for all.”
“I’m glad you know it,” he says hotly, but with a mollifying intent. His tone is almost servile, and his transition is decidedly inept, when he finally makes it. “So, then, who now, other than Joyce, is doing what you are doing, or anything close? Tell me that.”
“Well, Tom, of course.”
“Tom Eliot? It’s not the same, and anyway, it’s poetry. Apples and oranges.”
“Fine,” she says, “Proust, then. And I admire him immensely.”
“Yes, well, that’s very generous of you, I’m sure. But again, it is not comparable. Proust is a photographer. You are a painter.”
“Not true. Not true. In style perhaps he is, yes, but he is taking pictures inside the mind. And time is the centerpiece. The concept of it, the passage of it, the consciousness and, most of all, the capturing of it.”
“Yes, precisely, the capturing. That is documentation, not rendering. It is still a representation of the thing, not the thing itself, enliterated by the narrative.”
Finally he is saying what he means, and he is not giving offense. “And this,” he concludes, “if I understand you correctly, is both what you propose to do and what you have already done, perhaps, as you say, only primordially, in Dalloway.”
“Yes,” she murmurs. “Perhaps.”
She seems to have folded up in a haze of smoke. She is holding her cigarette in front of her face, but she is letting it burn there unsmoked. All desire for it apparently gone.
“My dear,” Leonard says, stepping closer, “your vision, your technique, they are your own. You have made that quite clear, and I am rightly astounded by what I have heard. Not least because of the science. I was not being facetious, you know, in my remark about Einstein.”
She does not respond.
“It’s quite remarkable actually, given what you’ve said, because he, too, has destroyed the models of the past, revolutionized the entire vocabulary that we use to describe our world. And, strange as this may sound, he is with you all the way to the lighthouse.”
Again there is no response.
“If you’ll bear with me, I think I can explain, or try to. Of course, you know Einstein’s famous theorem is E=mc2?”
He says this as a question, but she merely nods compliantly, still staring.
“Right, then. Now, this equation is not only about light—c being the speed of light, E being energy and m being mass—but also about the difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of the very process you wish to describe. The journey of the self through time. You follow?”
At this, she brings her eyes back into focus and looks at him curiously. Even the faintest implication of an insult to her intelligence will rouse her to reengage.
“According to the equation, an object’s mass will always be increasing as it approaches the speed of light. Another way of saying this is that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object of any mass to the speed of light, yet this is what time travel would require. So far so good?”
Still looking at him, she smiles wanly and nods again.
“But what I think you are proposing is that the self, or the traveling object in this case, has no mass at all, that it is not in fact an entity as such, but a being th
at is made entirely of thought, and so is itself a kind of light. Indeed, you seem to be saying that consciousness, selves, spaces and times, the whole of experience, is, in effect, a show of lights, and one, therefore, in which it might just be possible to travel through time.”
Now she is openly smirking.
“Yes, yes, all right,” she huffs, yielding at last as if she has not been away, “but don’t make too much of the symbolism of the lighthouse. It was, after all, really there in St. Ives. I showed it to you once. Godrevy, remember?”
“Yes, of course, of course,” he says. “But that is what makes this all so especially wonderful. It is both fanciful and true. And why? Because the truth, the nature of reality—as the physicists are at last coming to learn—is turning out to be quite beyond our wildest dreams. This new work you propose will be science fiction in the most literal sense, both a new science of the art of fiction, a complete reinvention of the novel as a genre, and a demonstration, by means of this new genre, of the newest scientific principles. You will write your story, the story of your childhood by the sea in St. Ives, and through it, by means of it, you will lead us through your quicksilver looking glass and into the Wonderland of space-time.”
In the pitch of his final excitement, he seems almost to be parodying her, but he is yielding.
She likes this very much, as always, and as he knew she would. He has been listening much more carefully than she assumed and, seemingly without effort, he has made her notion shine again with its own significance.
She looks up and around. The solstice sun is still high over the steeple of Berwick church. It will be light until nearly ten, but the orchard is full of shadows and is quickly turning cool. She takes his hand, turns him and begins to lead him back to the house, leaving the stepladder and the cut branches to stand in the grass until tomorrow.
“Well then,” she says haughtily, pretending to look away across the garden, but sharing the private smile that she knows, without having to look, is playing on Leonard’s lips as well. “You have understood.”
They take the long way round to the house this time, past the rhododendron bushes, which, having thrived under Leonard’s attention, are nearly as tall as the two of them and are covered with gorgeous, fat lavender blooms; past the bowling green, where they may still have time for a game after supper; and once again onto the central brick path.
As she opens the rear door that leads into the mint-green sitting room, and stands back to allow him to pass, she looks at him and smiles. “Are you in your stall, brother?” she says.
As he walks by her into the house, he looks back at her and smiles, too. “Indeed,” he says, and she follows him in.
ACT II
THE WAVES
1929–30
April 1929
VITA SACKVILLE-WEST may be a noblewoman, but regrettably she is not very bright. On publication day—the anniversary of Virginia’s mother’s death, 5 May 1927—Virginia had sent Vita a so-called dummy copy of To the Lighthouse in which all the pages were blank. She’d meant it literally, as a slight, but she’d barely taken the trouble to disguise the fact, thinking that the dummy would be too dumb to suspect the joke. She’d attached a self-effacing note to it by way of excuse, quipping that it was the best thing she had ever written, but by Vita’s testy response, she’d known that the crueler hint had been taken, and taken amiss. Ah, well. She cannot help herself. She must tease, and she must, at times, be cruel, especially to those, like Vita, who suffer from an excess of self-esteem. They must be taken down in her company, if nowhere else.
English history, particularly the history of highborn English families with long and distinguished ancestries, has always interested her. The Sackvilles fit the bill. They can trace their line all the way back to William the Conqueror, and their sprawling ancestral home at Knole is the largest country house in England. It comprises three hundred and sixty-five rooms, fifty-two staircases and seven courtyards. The building alone occupies four acres of ground, has a twenty-four-acre walled garden and stands in a thousand-acre deer park. The estate was bequeathed to the Sackvilles in the early 1600s by Elizabeth I, and it has been the family’s home ever since.
But as Virginia has so often found with such families, steeped in the lore and fascination of the past though they may be, the family members themselves are often a bore. She considers this the downside of heredity: The less desirable traits also pass down, even when—as is true in Vita’s case, because she is a woman—the property does not.
Oh, these aristocrats. They cannot help being caricatures. For a time, she finds this deeply amusing as spectacle, but they, alas—as the late queen had remarked—are not similarly amused. And, of course, the diversion wears off all too quickly in real life. It can only be sustained in stories. People remain interesting when they can be made to speak in her voice and to act out her fantasies, to propel. They rarely do so on their own.
Not that Vita has been entirely a bore since they began whatever it is that they began in the winter of 1925. On the contrary, Vita has been a more willing and more sustainably engaging puppet than most. But in the end, in her own mind, she is still a person, and a person of high birth, no less. As such, she entertains more than her fair share of the common delusion that she matters, and that she exists, neither of which, of course, is true.
But how can one say this in bed? Or, just before and afterward, at Knole, when the two of them are lounging like courtesans on red velvet cushions in front of the columned marble fireplace and the imposing polished brass andirons. How could she even think to speak of such things when she is dwarfed so completely by those high ornate walls and ceilings (they must be forty feet), with their cornices and friezes decorated with mermaids and mermen and seahorses, and the huge gilt-framed paintings (one of Gloriana herself) staring down? No. This is when the fiction is especially rich, when it is most charged with the intoxicating frisson of her imagination.
But oh, if only she could say what she means. If only she could explain. But explaining would mean exposing the brute truth to the brutes who most assuredly do not want to hear it. And so she must rely on satire and irony and parody, as Swift did, to say the harshest things. Yet these poor figures of fun—her material—will always insist on taking her seriously, on being flattered or offended, and on making it about themselves, when that is the last thing it is about.
How simply it is all laid out. She grows weary of the pretense. Even the challenges, the lauded causes of this brave new twentieth century: socialism, feminism, censorship, Sapphism, buggery. Their proponents make it all deadly serious, and she has played her part in their charade, because still, after all this stubborn time, so few have grasped the obvious: that of course these freedoms should be enjoyed; fairness should prevail. Yet it did not. This had made her angry, and so she had stood up.
But she has done so with her tongue firmly in her cheek and with the most abiding, most encoded sense of skepticism imaginable. Predictably, this is often missed, because all the while, all the time that she has been giving lectures—such serious lectures—“Women and Fiction”—at such serious institutions—Cambridge Yoniversity (as Lytton calls it, invoking the Sanskrit dirty word)—and agitating for the cause—in such serious journals of opinion and courts of law—she has always and inescapably been thinking what she has always thought, and what she had said to Leonard years ago: We are apes. I am addressing, I am cajoling, I am rousing a decidedly unshrewd shrewdness of apes.
Look around, she would shout, if only she dared. Look at yourselves, you organ grinder’s monkeys. Listen to yourselves, beating your hairy breasts and hooting your crude arguments, none of which should need to be made. We are animals, you fools, she would rail, spitting all the way up to the gallery, and we are possessed of only three qualities that might in any true sense be said to separate us from the beasts: We have the hubris to call ourselves men; we have the ambition to make ourselves gods; and we have the voluminous capacity for denial required to sustain the
former two pretenses.
Who, she wonders, would pay her to say that? And would her fee include or be in addition to the cost of paying someone to clear up all the rotten fruit and vegetables that she would no doubt leave behind, bespattering the venue? She would have to lecture wearing an oilskin and a sou’wester.
And what, after all, of her? The speaker. Is she an ape? Well, naturally, there’s the rub (there must always be one), as well as the extension of the joke, for like all apes, she believes that she is not one. Deep, deep down in her hominid brain, she, too, believes that she is special, rising above. Her politics and culture will make some difference, or perhaps just the smallest of ripples in the still-extant primordial ooze.
But—and here is the whole bilious point that so few of even the enlightened few ever seem to quite get—this is why she is so in love with Shakespeare. This is why she lifts him off the shelf almost daily when the work or the world becomes too much, and drinks him in like a cool, purifying draught of cynical moonlight.
He is never serious, and he is full of hate, and though he is rightly said to have invented humankind, he is no friend or lover of his creation. Even his comedies are strong medicine, sugared to help them go down, and the histories and tragedies are unmitigated, bitter as wormwood taken neat.
All his people, with all their overweening self-importance and clamorous life, he creates, he encompasses them so effortlessly, and with a sneer. And, most important for her purposes, all these newfangled bugaboos, these gender troubles in particular; the Bard had dashed them off like so much deadline copy, done and dusted, hands washed. There you are, he’d said in the blithe consigning voice of Pontius Pilate, handing over his folio, I give you the primer, your despicable mankind: Ecce homo.
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