The New York Review of Books, 1997
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Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, by Jane Gallop
SISTERS, LOVERS, TARTS, AND FRIENDS
This book opens with a confession of defeat. “There was a time, not so long ago, when I thought that it would be agreeable to write my own life. After three failures I have changed my mind,” Quentin Bell writes. “Therefore the main body of this work is devoted, not to me, but to my elders and betters, a term I have used to describe my parents, their friends and acquaintances.” His parents were the painter Vanessa Bell and the critic Clive Bell; their friends and acquaintances were, among others, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, and Ottoline Morrell.
Now in his mid-eighties, Bell evidently could not change the habits of a lifetime of literary self-effacement; he continues to feel comfortable in the position of the observer and uncomfortable as the observed. Knowing that the subject of an autobiography is no less at the mercy of the writer than the subject of a biography, he has prudently declined the blandishments of his writing self, and retreated to his accustomed safe place at the periphery. In his extraordinary biography of his aunt Virginia Woolf, published in 1972, Bell emerged as a writer of rare perspicacity and moral authority. It was he who first made public the painful family secret of Virginia’s sexual molestation by her half brothers Gerald and George Duckworth (Gerald examined her private parts when she was five, and George would come into her bedroom and paw her when she was a teenager) and excoriated the miscreants with a contemptuous force that no subsequent writer has matched. It was he, too, who brought to light a flirtation between his father and Virginia, which took place two years before his own birth in 1910, when his mother was preoccupied with her firstborn baby, Julian—this time passing judgment on Virginia herself, as well as on Clive, for bringing what seemed to him gratuitous unhappiness to Vanessa.
Virginia Woolf belongs to the elect body of biographies whose authors have been close to and fond of their subjects—works such as Boswell’s life of Johnson and Jones’s life of Freud—which gives them a conviction that biographies by strangers never achieve. But where Boswell and Jones write as sons, Bell writes as a nephew, one whose affection for his subject is never in doubt but whose primary loyalty to his immediate family is always implicit. Thus while Bell faithfully fulfills his contract to write a life of Virginia (he was asked to do so by Leonard Woolf), he allows us to feel the constraint that he feels when narrating family history strictly in relation to the consciousness of his aunt. Throughout the biography, we feel the presence of other consciousnesses (most notably the consciousness of Vanessa Bell) and sense other ways in which the story could be told. The episode of the flirtation between Clive and Virginia is only one of many passages where this perspectival tension flashes out of the narrative. Another is a passage dealing with the death of Julian Bell in the Spanish Civil War, at the age of thirty. “The matter concerns us only in as much as it concerned Virginia,” Bell remarks, as if to assure the reader that he is not being solicited for more sympathy than he, as the purchaser of a book about Virginia Woolf, is required to extend to the family of her sister. The reader, however, as he follows Bell’s account of Virginia’s tender ministrations to Vanessa, who had collapsed under the pressure of the unendurable and lay in bed for several weeks in “an unreal state,” cannot but find himself concerned about the matter far beyond the limits set by the punctilious biographer.
In Bloomsbury Recalled, free of the constraints of his nephew-biographer role, Bell returns to this and to other critical moments in his family’s history. But much water has gone over the dam since the publication of Virginia Woolf. In 1983, Frances Spalding’s biography of Vanessa Bell was published, followed by Bell’s half sister Angelica Garnett’s memoir Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood (1985); Jane Dunn’s comparative study of Virginia and Vanessa, A Very Close Conspiracy (1991); and Regina Marler’s Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell (1993). Bell need no longer apologize for writing about his mother in her own right; she has become a full-fledged character in the intertextual novel of Bloomsbury that has arisen from these and other publications by and about Bloomsbury figures, which the success of Virginia Woolf (and that of its predecessors, Michael Holroyd’s life of Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf’s autobiography) emboldened publishers to issue. The restoration and opening to the public of Charleston farmhouse, Bell’s childhood country home, was a kind of crowning moment of the diversion to Vanessa of the public’s exclusive interest in Virginia. “As you have the children, the fame by rights belongs to me,” Virginia once playfully wrote to Vanessa. But Vanessa now has the fame, too, less for her art (which belongs among the distinguished but non-innovative examples of Post-Impressionism) than for her remarkable, unconventional life. Ms. Spalding was the first to fully explore the almost comical unruliness of the household in which Quentin Bell grew up, a sort of single-parent household with explanations. The father, Clive, was absent—he and Vanessa had (amicably) split up in 1916, when the boys were six and eight—and yet he was present much of the time, often accompanied by a current mistress. The mother’s lover, the painter Duncan Grant, was present—he had moved in with Vanessa in 1916—and yet he was absent in a very fundamental sense, since he preferred to sleep with men. However, in 1918, Duncan fathered a child by Vanessa—Angelica—who grew up believing that Clive was her father and wasn’t disabused of the notion until she was eighteen. In Ms. Spalding’s version, Vanessa was the calm mistress of the situation, presiding over the family with a beautiful dignity and simplicity, exemplifying a life of enviable artistic and domestic fulfillment. Angelica Garnett’s memoir offered a different view, and sounded a different note—one that had never before been heard in the annals of Bloomsbury. Whereas the characteristic tone of Bloomsbury is soft, oblique, offhand, ironic, Deceived with Kindness is loud and direct, a cry of rage and resentment. The book reveals that Angelica had never been easy or happy in her bohemian family; she would have much preferred growing up in a regular bourgeois household, and she cannot forgive her parents for the lie they made her live under. She writes of her mother not as a magnificent but as a pathetic woman, forced by her passion for the charming, selfish, homosexual Grant into a sexless gray existence. Garnett herself emerges from the book—as many writers of victim autobiographies, beginning with Rousseau, have done—as a person rather short on humor.
Whether Quentin Bell’s failure of nerve in writing his autobiography was shaped by the example of his sister’s book we cannot presume to know, of course. But the cheerful and amiable book he did write could not contrast more sharply with Garnett’s dark, accusing memoir. Bell is not entirely uncritical of his elders and betters. He writes contemptuously of his father’s pro-Fascist leanings (“I for my part never found Clive great fun after the advent of Hitler. Taking an interest in politics, and feeling, as I do, that the Jews are the salt of the earth, it was too difficult”); he expresses his distaste for some elements of the gay society around Duncan Grant (“They were the most unappetizing male tarts I ever saw, filthy with a dirt which was moral rather than physical”); he complains about Leonard Woolf’s marmoset, Mitz. (“Marmosets are very small monkeys which I believe inhabit trees; in aspect they bear a certain resemblance to the late Dr. Goebbels.” Mitz “seemed to be in a perpetual state of vicious fury; ugly at all times, it became hideous when it vented its spite at the world. It was deeply in love with Leonard and would spit out its jealousy upon the rest of humanity. Perhaps it was showing its affection when it crouched upon his arm and defecated upon him; this was so much its favorite occupation that Leonard had to have waterproofing upon the sleeves of his jacket.”) But, significantly, Bell never complains about the adults vis-à-vis himself; he insists on his role of detached observer; he keeps his child’s griefs to himself.
This has resulted in a certain sacrifice of tautness in Bell’s narrative. Without the rudder of an engaged consciousness
, the anecdotes and observations of Bloomsbury Observed bob about somewhat aimlessly. Bell accepts the trade-off. With his characteristic modesty, he is content to offer a text that is a kind of extended footnote to the work of other chroniclers of Bloomsbury (including that of his younger self), correcting where he feels correction is required, clarifying, amplifying, modulating. He is no longer as exercised as he once was over the Duckworth brothers’ malefactions; he is more anxious now to reprove the writers who have gone beyond the evidence to claim that Virginia (and Vanessa, who had also suffered from George’s attentions) had been raped. “I must pause to state the proven facts of the case,” he writes, and goes on to say of Gerald’s inspection of Virginia’s genitals that “it was a horrid act, but we may doubt whether he was the first schoolboy to do such a thing; it is not a misdemeanor which justifies us in suspecting the offender of anything more serious.” As for George and his “kissing, fondling, toying,” he “was certainly guilty of stupid and inconsiderate behavior.… But it remains unclear exactly what happened and when.” Because “we have every reason to think that both Vanessa and Virginia were virgins when they married,” and because “according to his brother-in-law J. W. Hills, George himself was a virgin when he married,” Bell considers it highly improbable “that copulation took place.”
Analyzing a “lasting antipathy” between Clive and Leonard, which he believes derived from mutual jealousy over Virginia, Bell writes: “To Clive it seemed that Leonard was too austere, too political, too critical of that which he considered frivolous or worldly. He missed all the jolly and decorative side of life; this made him censorious and puritanical and limited his appreciation of the arts. In short he was a ‘kill-joy.’ Clive never quite forgave Leonard for having been an Apostle while he, Clive, was not. Leonard thought Clive an intellectual lightweight whose views on politics and life in general were those of a timid, spoilt and selfish man; as a critic he was superficial, as a man fussy, snobbish and frequently ridiculous.” Bell goes on to extend the opposition between his father and uncle to his brother and himself. He writes that in the period 1926 to 1933 “I was charmed by Clive’s worldly panache, his urbanity and his sense of fun, while Julian, serious, sometimes ruthlessly serious, a member of the Labor Party, an Apostle, unworldly, interested in poetry and at times displaying a kind of intellectual puritanism, was probably at that time Leonard’s favorite nephew.… I was regarded … as a very precious, affected young man.” However, the novelistic polarity of the frivolous, apolitical younger brother versus the dour, politically correct elder one falls apart almost immediately, since Quentin himself, as he tells us, became involved in politics—politics that were far to the left of Julian’s—as the 1930s progressed. Bell never tells us how he felt about his brother. He indicates and hints but he never comes out and says—as he never comes out and says what he thinks of his sister’s book. We must read between the lines. “Of the three of us I was the least precious,” he writes, as if stating an obvious and mildly irksome fact. He goes on to tell the following astonishing anecdote, set in 1937 when Julian was deciding whether or not to go fight in Spain. “There was a meal at Charleston eaten by Vanessa, we three children and, I think, Duncan. Vanessa served a pudding; she gave half to Julian, the rest of us divided what remained. Vanessa herself realized that there was something more than a little absurd about this method of displaying affection and said something like: ‘You see, I have to.’ My own feeling was: ‘how hideously embarrassing for Julian.’ Luckily he liked the pudding and ate it all up with an unembarrassed grin.”
One can’t but feel that Bell’s telling of this incident, which has lingered in his memory for nearly sixty years, has undergone some of the softening changes that his account of Gerald’s and George’s horrid acts has undergone. When he was younger, Bell’s innate geniality (he writes of “my flattering pencil”) could give way if the provocation was severe enough. Some prods—like that of the unspeakable Mitz or those of certain impertinent revisionist writers about Virginia Woolf (“I cannot feel much charity for those imbeciles who have … maintained,” he writes, that Leonard “did not love Virginia”)—will evidently never lose their electrical charge. But in general Bell allows the laid-back, Clivish parts of his nature, the parts drawn to the jolly and decorative side of life, to override, if not to entirely eradicate, the austere and censorious aspects of himself he associates with his uncle. In a letter of 1907 (it appears in Regina Marler’s selection), Vanessa drew a remarkable sketch of her husband—one in which her younger son might well recognize himself today: “I see that Clive has taken up the only possible attitude.… One ought to go one’s own way without argument or fuss and without attempting to make the stupid see one’s point of view, and when asked to do things one does not want to do one ought to give a half jocular refusal and stick to it, which is the only way of baffling them.”
The New York Times Book Review, 1996
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Bloomsbury Recalled, by Quentin Bell
“A VERY SADISTIC MAN”
On page 313 of his biography of Ted Hughes, Jonathan Bate paraphrases a racy passage from the journal Sylvia Plath kept in the last months of her life:
On the day that she found Yeats’s house in Fitzroy Road, she rushed round in a fever of excitement to tell Al [Alvarez]. That evening, she noted in her journal with her usual acerbic wit, they were engaged in a certain activity when the telephone rang. She put her foot over his penis so that, as she phrased it, he was appropriately attired to receive the call.
We assume that Bate is paraphrasing rather than quoting Plath’s entry because of the copyright law prohibiting quotation of unpublished writing without permission of the writer or of his or her estate. As Bate wrote in The Guardian in April 2014, in an angry article entitled “How the Actions of the Ted Hughes Estate Will Change My Biography,” the estate had abruptly withdrawn permission to quote after initially enthusiastically approving “my plan for what I called ‘a literary life.’”
But in fact, the action of the estate was not the reason for Bate’s resort to paraphrase. As readers familiar with the Hughes/Plath legend will realize or have already realized, Bate was paraphrasing words he could not possibly have read since Plath’s last journal was destroyed by Hughes soon after her suicide. (“I did not want her children to have to read it,” Hughes explained when he revealed his act of destruction in the introduction to a volume of Plath’s earlier journals.) What Bate was paraphrasing, he tells us, was Olwyn Hughes’s memory of what she had read in the journal before her brother destroyed it.
In the introduction to his book, Bate—who is a professor of English literature at Oxford and the author of numerous books on Shakespeare, along with a biography of John Clare—offers a “cardinal rule” of literary biography: “The work and how it came into being is what is worth writing about, what is to be respected. The life is invoked in order to illuminate the work; the biographical impulse must be at one with the literary-critical.” And: “The task of the literary biographer is not so much to enumerate all the available facts as to select those outer circumstances and transformative moments that shape the inner life in significant ways.” But these fine words—are just fine words. The revelation, if that’s what it is, of sex between Plath and Alvarez (in his autobiographical writings Alvarez indicated that there had never been any) illuminates neither Hughes’s work nor his inner life. It only makes plain, along with his prurience, Bate’s dislike of Alvarez. “At the time of Sylvia’s death, a contemporary noted that Alvarez had a ‘hangdog adoration of T.H.’ and expressed the opinion that he was ‘stuck in Freudianism like an American teenager,’” Bate writes, and, as if this wasn’t mean enough, adds: “Alvarez could make or break a poet, but his own poetry was thin gruel.” Bate’s malice is the glue that holds his incoherent book together—malice directed at other peripheral characters but chiefly directed at its subject. Bate wants to cut Hughes down to size and does so, interestingly, by blowing him up into a kind of e
xtra-large sex maniac.
He starts the book with a chapter called “The Deposition.” In 1986 a psychiatrist named Jane Anderson, a friend of Plath’s on whom a character in The Bell Jar had been based, sued the makers of a film version of the novel, along with Hughes (who held the copyright of the book), for portraying her as a lesbian. The lawsuit was settled. It was a nuisance and expense for Hughes, but hardly a seminal event that merits the opening chapter of his biography. The purpose of the chapter is to introduce this piece of Anderson’s testimony:
[Sylvia] said that she had met a man who was a poet, with whom she was very much in love. She went on to say that this person, whom she described as a very sadistic man, was someone she cared about a great deal.… She also said that she thought she could manage him, manage his sadistic characteristics.
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