They sit in contented silence for several minutes, listening to the bees coming and going at their business in the flower beds, and to the innumerable sparrows and finches gossiping away. Then a thrush alights nearby, and its insistent airy cry spears the chatter of the common throng as if someone is at the piano in the corner of a cocktail party, fiddling with the farthest treble keys.
“Are you happy with Carrington?” Virginia asks finally.
Lytton takes a moment to reply. He wants to say this well and simply.
“She brings me tea and biscuits as I work,” he begins, pausing respectfully between each phrase so that he can pare the next. “She looks after my feebleness. She is enthralled by my every bon mot. And you are right, I do need an audience. I always have. She is like some gentle creature of the forest who has wandered into my ruin and made the poppies grow there, and the daisies and the clover, too, in all the cracks and empty spaces where the wind had whistled through.”
Virginia sighs. “And the boys?”
“They are the wind still whistling through,” he says with regret, “in all the rooms where I have not let her enter.”
“And are there so many?”
“Boys, or rooms?”
“Rooms.”
“No. Not so very many. But they remain. And they remain empty. The company is always temporary, and the emptiness always hurts, but I cannot do otherwise.”
“And Carrington?”
“She, too, has vacancies, and guests.”
“But it works?”
“Yes. Strange—but it seems to.” He turns to her. “And what of you and Leonard?”
She does not hesitate.
“We have a phrase we use for it. It sums up the pattern of our lives. We spend our mornings in contemplation and literary toil. We spend our afternoons walking and gardening. In the late afternoon or early evening we sometimes have a game of bowls. We have supper, and then we sit in the sitting room across from each other by the fire and smoke and talk and read. And every now and then, one of us will look up and say, ‘Are you in your stall, brother?’”
Lytton grins, and they lapse again into the tributary silence for which both their recitations have seemed to call. This is yet another precarious place in both of them where they cannot linger too long.
“And what do you hear of your young nephew up at Cambridge?” Lytton says finally, changing course.
“Julian? Oh, all the best and the usual. He’s joined the Apostles, of course.”
“Of course.” Lytton nods. “And good.”
“He’s having the ripe loving time: the Greeks, the greens, the punts and the pederasty. I don’t know if that last bit is really his inclination, or if he’s just doing what you all did when it was the time to do it, but whatever the case, he claims to be sleeping with one of his fellow students, Anthony Blunt.”
“Interesting.”
“I suppose,” Virginia says. “Or par for the course. But he does seem to be getting all the benefit of his time there. He’s writing poetry. He’s growing. He seems happy.”
“Then he is indeed doing what he should, and when,” Lytton replies, a bit sadly. “He will never be so happy again.”
“That does seem true of you all,” Virginia says. “I’ve seen that. Leonard is happy in his own way now, I know that, but I think he still looks back on those days as blessed, and their particular bliss as irretrievable. He tries to keep it kindled with you and the others when you assemble, but it’s not the same.”
“No, it is not the same. Life goes on, as they say, but something of us does not go with it. It gets left behind somehow, and the separation always gapes.”
“I know precisely what you mean,” Virginia says. “I don’t mean about being at school, of course, or the pleasure young men take in all-male company, but about leaving parts of you behind as you go through life. I have done so, too, and it’s painful, like a fracture in the bone that never heals, and always aches when it’s going to rain.”
She considers this. Coming back to the book, and wanting to say something critical that is not personal, but still important and true, she adds, “I wonder if this isn’t the limitation of biography.”
“Hmm?”
“This splintering, I mean.” This breakage in the self. It means in the end that we cannot know ourselves. In which case, how can we ever know anyone, as Freud said, near or far? Moreover, how can we write a life when the self is beyond our grasp? His formulation there was quite beautiful, actually. When we set out to interpret our own minds, much less the minds of our fellow human beings, whether here and now or there and then, it makes little difference; we are in the liquid landscape of dreams.”
Lytton sighs in agreement, then turns to her with a small child’s pout. “Was there a compliment for me in there somewhere, dearest?”
She throws herself against him, roughly kissing the side of his face. “Oh, yes, my love, yes. Truly. I only meant that it is a very interesting difficulty, and I am struggling with it myself. How does one tell the truth in biography or in autobiography when the truth is not to be had? Which is to say that if one finds fault with your interpretation of Elizabeth or Essex, perhaps it is because it is inherent to the genre. Someone else’s life of these same two people would suffer from the same fault. Misinterpretation.”
“So the general fault is my accomplishment,” Lytton says, taking a wry delight in the sheer legerdemain of her compliment, which only she could give in just this way. But he is slightly wounded all the same.
“Or the general fault is mine as well,” she says, a little stiffly, skirting past whatever nick she has given him. “Which I suppose is most of why I have taken refuge in fiction when telling the stories of real people’s lives. Fiction is all there is, and all of my fiction has been, more or less, the stories of real people’s lives.”
“Yes, I see,” he says stolidly, though inside he is straining on the leap from his need, momentarily exposed, to the cold discourse she is insisting on. But she cannot give him anything more. He knows the technique. He has used it many times himself to deny the inconvenient emotion. But he will not indulge her on her fiction, even so. Dropping back is the most he can manage.
She can feel this, too, of course, and he feels her feeling it, but neither of them will own it. They are too much alike, too trained in the gambits of their class and conversation, but they are also far, far too sensitive, by birth or nature or constitution, to ignore what is so potently relayed in all that cannot be said. It is the caughtness of their being, the innermost clash in them repeating. It is the very thing that has drawn them close, yet always held them at arm’s length, both from each other and themselves. He would say it is their Englishness doing battle with their ungovernable souls. She would say it is the flashpoint of life where the overflow of knowing crashes headlong against the intractability of the will—again and again and again—like breakers against a seawall.
Leonard has just appeared on the path at the far end of the green, waving and smiling and squinting in the sun. She must give the two of them their time together. Rising from her seat, but without looking down at him, she puts her hand on Lytton’s shoulder. He gently takes it in his own hand, like a courtier, and kisses it. Slowly she lets it slide from his fingers, and she drifts away across the green toward Leonard.
November 1930
AT LAST SHE has met the great Yeats. She had met him briefly once before, in 1907, but he hadn’t remembered. Well, why should he have, she supposes. She had been an unknown girl of twenty-five, and he, a man of forty-some, had simply been himself, his name, the revered established poet with his seat saved for him in the pantheon.
But this time, at one of the flamboyant Lady Ottoline’s Thursday teas at Gower Street, she had met him properly, and this time she had done so as a lauded novelist, critic and essayist in her own right, the now famous author of—it is a list she often repeats, if only to herself—Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Common Reader and A Room of
One’s Own. She says it all through this way, like an announcement, because she likes the sound of her titles just so, all in a row, and the mental view they present of her, standing proudly pinned and glowing with awards. Her bibliography precedes her wherever she goes. She has no need of footmen’s introductions, bellowed at the ballroom door. No need except here in her room, alone, where she sometimes fails to exist.
But Yeats. Now there is someone who exists. At sixty-five—she puts it about there—he is still a figure, but human, after all. He has lost some of his blood. His mind is still vivacious, quite so, but his flesh, his body, well, alas, it has done what bodies do, and he is now a leached and chalky version of himself—truly dusted white, like a baker.
Meanwhile, she is now the one in her forties, and flying high on the viewless wings, as she’d told him right off. Not thrown for a moment, he’d sighed pleasantly at the familiar words, as if tasting them again for the first time, and peering at her through the thick lenses of his lunettes, he’d replied, “Ah, the dull brain perplexes and retards . . . but haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne.”
Yes, he is still all there all right, and despite his visible decline, he’d still looked every inch the romantic man of letters, perhaps more so, with his brooding brow and his penetrating gaze, his set mouth with its pouting lower lip and the shadowed circumflex above the chin. And then, of course, because it must be so in this sort of picture, there was the most expected detail, his tousled mop of grey hair, which had streamed back from his forehead in set, yet somehow perfectly disheveled waves, as if still bearing the imprint of the anguished hand that had no doubt been clasped there throughout some long and stormy act of contemplation.
Only the softer indications of his demeanor and dress—his general fadedness, the earnestness of his suit with its endearing bow tie drooping and half undone on one side, and his thick woolen socks bunching around his ankles—had kept him from seeming both laughable and tragic at once, like something Byronic that had been left out in the rain.
He’d seemed to be aware of or bothered by none of this, however, and this, she thinks, is what had given him his air of somehow existing more fully than she and those around him. Other people’s eyes did not give him his place. They did not affect him, and this had made her like and envy him immensely.
Then, too, there was his talk, which had been nothing like what she’d expected, not at all the kind of oracular claptrap that one presumed would issue from the mouth of a Nobel laureate presiding at one of Ottoline’s teas.
From Keats he’d launched directly into an admittedly overwhelming peroration on his mystical philosophy. This had emphasized, among many, many other things, his belief in the importance of lunar power; the necessity in creative endeavor of asserting what he’d called the anti-self through turning away from or shattering a mirror; and finally his description of the symbolism of the tower—the title of his latest collection of poems—which, when its turret was struck by lightning, became a representation of the human soul galvanized by spiritual force.
“And there,” he’d said of this last image, as if it all should have been perfectly plain, “we have your lighthouse.”
Listening to him, she had been dazzled by the rush of his ideas and by the seeming completeness and lucidity of his transcendental vision. She had said little. She’d absorbed only a fraction of what he’d said, but thinking of it now, she is amazed again and almost haunted by his imagery, and how closely it bears on her own experience, her own creative, hallucinatory—and yes, perhaps, also transcendental—vision.
She might have liked to tell him about Adeline, about her own transformative encounter with the looking glass in the hall at Talland House, and the revelation it, too, had contained about the nature of the self and the unseen universe. But she could not have done so, not with all those society barnacles clinging.
Even if they had been alone, she feels sure that she would have said nothing, for as she had sat there watching him holding forth on the sofa—strangely excerpted from, yet concealed within, the pomp and puppetry of Ottoline’s salon, and reeling off the secrets of her inner world to her as if they’d been written on the palm of his hand—she had become conscious of feeling heavily and almost terrifyingly tongue-tied.
She remembers now that during their conference there had actually been long moments when she had wanted to speak to him, when she had wanted—quite desperately, in fact, she realizes—to tell him everything, yet she had found herself strangely and confoundingly unable to make the words come out of her mouth. What a sudden and powerful feeling it had been. Thinking of it, she can almost feel it again now, that sense of being rendered forcibly mute, as if her tongue had turned to lead or been magically excised.
How odd, yet how wonderful. How stymied. How full.
The anti-self, she thinks, recalling his term. And the mirror. The shattered self, the sharded self, the self that does not walk in this world. This was the very substance of her new work.
And what of his moon? She smiles at the thought of his lunettes, then smiling more, she recalls Lytton howling her married name in the garden that day as he’d talked of Plato’s third sex, the androgynous children of the moon.
She might have told Yeats of all these things, of her work now on The Waves, whose tides are governed by the moon, or of Arnold’s iterating waves breaking in her mind and on the moon-blanched land. She might have told him of how she’d first called this book The Moths, to invoke these creatures of the dark, emerging under the moon, drawn to the light. Yes, there was the light of the lighthouse—as he’d said—but through time, all the way back to the Alexandrian Pharos itself, there too was his symbol, towering above the basin of the ancient world, its signal fire burning at its tip.
What would he have made of all this? Or had he known it already, and that was how he’d said it all so quickly, picking all the points of contact and stunning her so completely into silence? And then, at the end, the most stunning part of all, as if he had known, too, that in her silence she’d been dying to verify her secrets, he’d said, patting her kindly: “There will be time. Don’t worry.”
But when? she’d thought. You are sixty-five, and who knows?
“We will meet again,” he’d said consolingly. “Wait and see.”
And so she is waiting and seeing, sitting in her chair with her board on her lap and listening to the faint crepitation of the fallen leaves as they blow across the cobble path and catch in the close-set brushwork of the hedge that surrounds the churchyard just beyond their gate.
She is reminding herself of what she has already done, because when she is sitting like this before a scratch-ridden page, full of sentences with lines through them, and the blots and bleeds of a stifled pen, she needs reminding. She needs to tell herself again that it is in fact she who wrote—and more so, conceived—To the Lighthouse. Sometimes she will even take down the book, as now—it is lying spined on the arm of her chair—and read in it, flipping at random, stopping in unknown places so that she might be helpfully surprised by what she finds there.
It is indeed the story of her family life, just as she promised it to Adeline, but in a dream. As in a dream.
There is Mother, saintly and retiring, gliding like an apparition, swiftly and soundlessly, attending all at once to the whelps and wheedles of her eight children, the pressing idiosyncrasies of guests and the preening of her needy husband spouting Cowper, over and over, so as to be heard: We perished each alone.
Or there she is in the next village, suddenly appearing, kneeling at the bedsides of the sick and dying with her basket full of ribboned hopes and consolations. And, look now, there she is again in all her beauty, sitting on the front porch knitting, her portrait being painted by yet another admirer, looking over all her mates and charges and making all her matches between them for life.
Father is ubiquitous, too, frowning and pacing and versifying, banging on the table at dinner. My need, he says. My need. There are the tides and the whitecaps an
d the little boat, and Adrian’s yearning for the lighthouse. And there are all the other siblings, too—half and full—all themselves and all her: Stella, George and Gerald, Thoby, Nessa and herself, and even waifish Laura, ghostliest of all.
It is all there. Read it—she says to herself, as if she is saying it to someone down the years—and dream.
But I must go on now, she reminds herself, crafting the new dream, starting again from nothing. She marvels at this, the way the mind makes a story for itself each night in dreams, scripts it and peoples it, and places it, and puts it out of time, yet in its own time, as if even then, when we are resting, as we must, we must still be entertained, we must have our stories.
What monumental energy it must take, she thinks, how powerful the subconscious must be, to satisfy this endless craving for experience, which though virtual and not our own, will do nonetheless, because we like so much to peep. No, it is more pathological than that. We love—we need to peep through the pinhole in the wall, and not just at anything or anyone, but ourselves. Our species, how thoroughly neurotic it is. Is there any other creature so in need of this as we are, this anodyne of voyeurism? Any being that needs it so constantly like a drug, so addictively, that it will break itself in the trying?
For that is what I do, she thinks. I break myself each time in the trying, because I can do nothing else. I want nothing else. And these are my people. I and Adeline, the selves that I am and those that I have been, my family as it was then and my family as it is now.
She is thinking back to Lytton and this question of the nature of biography, or really of autobiography. They are the same, for we are other people even to ourselves, and other people are our proxy selves, as little known to us as we are. And so—the heady doctor will not let go—we, they, are as interpreted as dreams. Biography is fiction, and group biography, well, that is as old as time, all the cavemen gathered round the fire telling tales. Lytton had made his mark of sorts with Eminent Victorians, telling his tales out of school, slighting all the giants of the age. Elizabeth and Essex was more so, a kind of gossip as biography. And she had found it superficial and insincere, though attractive to the eye of the common reader, no doubt. They had amused their eyes with it.
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