Forty-One False Starts

by Janet Malcolm

  In the annals of Bloomsbury, Thoby’s death, though as brutal and pointless as Julia’s and Stella’s, has not been accorded the same tragic status. Rather, in fact, the annalists have treated it almost as a kind of death of convenience, like the death of a relative who leaves deserving legatees a bequest of such staggering size that his own disappearance from the scene goes almost unnoticed. What happened was this: The previous year, one of the dingy young men, Clive Bell—who was actually neither as dingy nor as intellectual as the rest—had broken ranks and proposed to Vanessa, and she had refused him. Four months before Thoby’s death, he had proposed again, and had again been refused. But now, two days after Thoby’s death, Vanessa accepted him, and two months later she married him. As Leslie Stephen’s death had allowed the children to flee from the ogre’s castle, so Thoby’s death melted the ice princess’s heart. After Clive’s first proposal, Vanessa had written to a friend, “It really seems to matter so very little to oneself what one does. I should be quite happy living with anyone whom I didn’t dislike . . . if I could paint and lead the kind of life I like. Yet for some mysterious reason one has to refuse to do what someone else very much wants one to. It seems absurd. But absurd or not, I could no more marry him than I could fly.” Yet now, in the kind of emotional tour de force usually achieved by love potions, Vanessa’s feeling for Clive suddenly ignited, so that three weeks after the death of her brother she could write to another friend, “I as yet can hardly understand anything but the fact that I am happier than I ever thought people could be, and it goes on getting better every day.”

  Quentin Bell, Vanessa’s son, writing of Thoby’s death in his extraordinary biography of his aunt, Virginia Woolf (1972), pauses to “wonder what role this masterful and persuasive young man, together with his wife—for he would surely have married—would have played in the life of his sisters.” Quentin then goes on to coolly enumerate the advantages that accrued to the sisters from their brother’s death:

  I suspect that, if he had lived, he would have tended to strengthen rather than to weaken those barriers of speech and thought and custom which were soon to be overthrown amongst his friends. It was his death which began to work their destruction: Mr Sydney-Turner and Mr Strachey became Saxon and Lytton, they were at Gordon Square continually and in her distress Virginia wanted to see no one save them and Clive . . . It was then that Virginia discovered that these young men had not only brains but hearts, and that their sympathy was something different from the dreadful condolences of relations. As a result of Thoby’s death Bloomsbury was refounded upon the solid base of deep mutual understanding; his death was also the proximate cause for Vanessa’s marriage.

  Since Quentin’s own existence was precariously poised on this concatenation of events, he may be forgiven for his rather unfeeling words about his unfortunate uncle. Whether Thoby’s influence on Bloomsbury would in fact have been as baneful as Quentin postulates cannot be known, of course. But this much is clear: the never-never-land household of the four happy orphans had to be broken up (just as the netherworld of Hyde Park Gate had to be fled) if Bloomsbury was to attain the form by which we know it—a coterie of friends gathered around the nucleus of two very peculiar marriages.

  After their wedding and honeymoon, in the winter of 1907, Clive and Vanessa took over 46 Gordon Square, and Virginia and Adrian moved to a house in nearby Fitzroy Square. Four years later, on July 3, 1911, another of Thoby’s astonishing Cambridge friends—a “violent trembling misanthropic Jew” who “was as eccentric, as remarkable in his way as Bell and Strachey in theirs”—came to dine with the Bells at Gordon Square; Virginia dropped in after dinner. He was Leonard Woolf, just back from seven years in Ceylon with the Civil Service, and he was stunned by the great changes, the “profound revolution” that had taken place in Gordon Square since he dined there last, in 1904. In Sowing, the first volume of his five-volume autobiography—a work of Montaigne-like contemplativeness and poise, published in the 1960s, and the overture to the Bloomsbury revival—Leonard recalled his first meeting with the Stephen sisters, in Thoby’s rooms at Cambridge. They were around twenty-one and eighteen, and “in white dresses and large hats, with parasols in their hands, their beauty literally took one’s breath away, for suddenly seeing them one stopped astonished, and everything, including one’s breathing for one second, also stopped as it does when in a picture gallery you suddenly come face to face with a great Rembrandt or Velasquez.” In 1911, Vanessa’s and Virginia’s beauty was undiminished (though Leonard pauses to remark—he writes at the age of eighty-one and has outlived his wife by twenty-one years and his sister-in-law by one—that “Vanessa was, I think, usually more beautiful than Virginia. The form of her features was more perfect, her eyes bigger and better, her complexion more glowing”). But what “was so new and so exhilarating to me in the Gordon Square of July 1911 was the sense of intimacy and complete freedom of thought and speech, much wider than in the Cambridge of seven years ago, and above all including women.” To understand Leonard’s exhilaration, to see his revolution in action, we must return to Virginia’s “Old Bloomsbury” memoir and a famous passage in it:

  It was a spring evening [in 1908]. Vanessa and I were sitting in the drawing room. The drawing room had greatly changed its character since 1904. The Sargent-Furse age was over. The age of Augustus John was dawning. His “Pyramus” filled one entire wall. The Watts’ portraits of my father and my mother were hung downstairs if they were hung at all. Clive had hidden all the match boxes because their blue and yellow swore with the prevailing color scheme. At any moment Clive might come in and he and I should begin to argue—amicably, impersonally at first; soon we should be hurling abuse at each other and pacing up and down the room. Vanessa sat silent and did something mysterious with her needle or her scissors. I talked, egotistically, excitedly, about my own affairs no doubt. Suddenly the door opened and the long and sinister figure of Mr Lytton Strachey stood on the threshold. He pointed his finger at a stain on Vanessa’s white dress.

  “Semen?” he said.

  Can one really say it? I thought and we burst out laughing. With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down. A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us. Sex permeated our conversation. The word bugger was never far from our lips. We discussed copulation with the same excitement and openness that we had discussed the nature of good. It is strange to think how reticent, how reserved we had been and for how long.

  “This was an important moment in the history of the mores of Bloomsbury,” Quentin writes in Virginia Woolf, and—getting a bit carried away—“perhaps in that of the British middle classes.” By the time Leonard came home from Ceylon, the transformation of the innocent girls in white dresses into women from whose lips the word “bugger” (Bloomsbury’s preferred term for a homosexual) was never far was complete. Indeed, in the case of Virginia such talk was no longer of much moment or interest. She was doing regular reviewing, working on her first novel, finding Adrian irritating as a housemate, and looking for a husband. The society of buggers had, in fact, become “intolerably boring” to her. “The society of buggers has many advantages—if you are a woman,” she allowed. “It is simple, it is honest, it makes one feel, as I noted, in some respects at one’s ease.” But

  it has this drawback—with buggers one cannot, as nurses say, show off. Something is always suppressed, held down. Yet this showing off, which is not copulating, necessarily, nor altogether being in love, is one of the great delights, one of the chief necessities of life. Only then does all effort cease; one ceases to be honest, one ceases to be clever. One fizzes up into some absurd delightful effervescence of soda water or champagne through which one sees the world tinged with all the colours of the rainbow.

  The married Vanessa, on the other hand, continued to be drawn to queer society. “Did you have a pleasant afternoon buggering one or more of the young men we left for you?” she wrote to John Maynard Keynes in April 1914. (Keynes was another Cambridge
bugger, who had joined the Bloomsbury circle around 1907.) “It must have been delicious,” she went on. “I imagine you . . . with your bare limbs intertwined with him and all the ecstatic preliminaries of Sucking Sodomy—it sounds like the name of a station.” Vanessa’s connection with Duncan Grant, which began during the First World War—he became her life’s companion, even while continuing relationships with a series of boyfriends—has been called tragic; Duncan’s inability to reciprocate Vanessa’s love because he simply wasn’t interested in women has been regarded as one of the sad mischances of her life. But the letter she wrote to Maynard and others of its kind—which appear in Regina Marler’s excellently edited and annotated Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell (1993)—give one a whiff of something in Vanessa that may have impelled her to deliberately choose a homosexual as the love of her life; they suggest that Duncan’s homosexuality may have been the very pivot of her interest in him. In a letter to Duncan of January 1914, Vanessa, bemoaning the British public’s resistance to postimpressionist painting, wrote, “I believe distortion is like Sodomy. People are simple blindly prejudiced against it because they think it abnormal.” Vanessa herself seemed almost blindly prejudiced for the abnormal.

  But we are getting ahead of our story. Let us return to the scene of the sisters sitting in the drawing room of 46 Gordon Square in the spring of 1908. We will never know how much of Virginia’s account is truth and how much comic invention. (“I do not know if I invented it or not,” she offhandedly remarks, by way of introducing the scene.) But one detail stands out in its probable authenticity: Clive had hidden all the match boxes because their blue and yellow swore with the prevailing color scheme. Here, we feel, Virginia was reporting accurately. And here, we have to acknowledge, Clive was doing something that, in its way, was quite as remarkable for a man of his background as talking dirty was for girls of Virginia and Vanessa’s background. In his hard-core aestheticism, Clive was behaving as few Victorian men behaved. Clive came from a rich family that had made its money from mines in Wales and had built a hideous and pretentious mansion in Wiltshire, decorated with fake-Gothic ornament and animal trophies. Numerous sardonic descriptions of the place have come down to us from Vanessa, who would visit there as a dutiful daughter-in-law and write to Virginia of the “combination of new art and deer’s hoofs.” At Cambridge, Clive had written poetry and hung a Degas reproduction in his rooms but had not got into the Apostles, the secret discussion society that, in the Bloomsbury gospel according to Leonard, was decisive to Bloomsbury’s intellectual and moral avant-gardism. Thoby had not got into the Apostles, either (nor, for that matter, had Leslie Stephen), but Lytton, Maynard, Saxon, Leonard, Morgan (Forster), and Roger (Fry) had.

  Clive was the lightweight of Bloomsbury; today nobody reads his books on art, and his own friends patronized him. When he became engaged to Vanessa, Virginia considered him unworthy. “When I think of father and Thoby and then see that funny little creature twitching his pink skin and jerking out his little spasm of laughter I wonder what odd freak there is in Nessa’s eyesight,” she wrote to Violet Dickinson in December 1906. In Virginia Woolf, Quentin writes that Henry James’s “views of the bridegroom were even more unfavourable than those of Virginia in her most hostile moods.” (James was an old family friend of the Leslie Stephens.) Quentin then quotes this passage from a letter of February 17, 1907, that James wrote to Mrs. W. K. Clifford:

  However, I suppose she knows what she is about, and seemed very happy and eager and almost boisterously in love (in that house of all the Deaths, ah me!) and I took her an old silver box (“for hairpins”), and she spoke of having got “a beautiful Florentine teaset” from you. She was evidently happy in the latter, but I winced and ground my teeth when I heard of it. She and Clive are to keep the Bloomsbury house, and Virginia and Adrian to forage for some flat somewhere—Virginia having, by the way, grown quite elegantly and charmingly and almost “smartly” handsome. I liked being with them, but it was all strange and terrible (with the hungry futurity of youth;) and all I could mainly see was the ghosts, even Thoby and Stella, let alone dear old Leslie and beautiful, pale, tragic Julia—on all of whom these young backs were, and quite naturally, so gaily turned.

  The passage is wonderful (“the hungry futurity of youth”!) but puzzling. Quentin has said that James’s views of Clive were even more unfavorable than Virginia’s, but James says nothing bad about him—he doesn’t single him out from the other callously happy young people. When we read the whole of James’s letter (it appears in volume IV of Leon Edel’s edition of James’s letters), our puzzlement dissolves. In the sentence immediately preceding this passage, James writes:

  And apropos of courage, above all, oh yes, I went to see Vanessa Stephen on the eve of her marriage (at the Registrar’s) to the quite dreadful-looking little stoop-shouldered, long-haired, third-rate Clive Bell—described as an “intimate friend” of poor, dear, clear, tall, shy, superior Thoby—even as a little sore-eyed poodle might be an intimate friend of a big mild mastiff.

  In his Notes, Quentin thanks Edel for bringing the letter to his attention, but when it comes to the point, he can’t avail himself of Edel’s offering. Like Hamlet pulling back from killing Claudius, Quentin cannot commit the parricide of publishing James’s terrible words. However, in leaving the trace, the clue to the uncommitted murder, he has afforded us a rare glimpse into the workshop where biographical narratives are manufactured.

  In an earlier work, Bloomsbury, published in 1968, Quentin confesses to the sin of discretion. “I have omitted a good deal that I know and much more at which I can guess concerning the private lives of the people whom I shall discuss,” he writes in his introduction, and loftily continues, “This is, primarily, a study in the history of ideas, and although the moeurs of Bloomsbury have to be considered and will in a general way be described, I am not required nor am I inclined to act as Clio’s chambermaid, to sniff into commodes or under beds, to open love-letters or scrutinize diaries.” But when he accepted the commission from Leonard of writing Virginia’s life, Quentin—obviously aware that the biographer is Clio’s chambermaid—bowed to biography’s lowering imperatives. He wrote of what his mother and his aunt, respectively, called George Duckworth’s “delinquencies” and “malefactions,” and of Gerald Duckworth’s as well: of how during Leslie Stephen’s final illness George would come to Virginia’s bedroom late at night and fling himself on her bed, “cuddling and kissing and otherwise embracing” her, and of how Gerald (according to an early memory of Virginia’s) had stood her on a ledge and, to her lifelong shivering distress, had meddled with her privates. Quentin wrote of an unconsummated but serious (and to his mother seriously wounding) flirtation between Clive and Virginia, which developed during the spring of 1908, when Vanessa was in thrall to her first baby, Julian, and Clive and the still unmarried Virginia would take long walks together to get away from Julian’s nappies and screams. (The fastidious Clive “hated mess—the pissing, puking and slobbering of little children distressed him very much, so did their noise,” his son writes.) He wrote of Virginia and Leonard’s sexual incompatibility. (Like Vanessa, Virginia had initially refused her husband-to-be and, even when she was on the verge of accepting him, had told him of her doubts about “the sexual side of it.” She wrote in a letter of May 1912, “As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments—when you kissed me the other day was one—when I feel no more than a rock.”) Quentin quoted a letter from Vanessa to Clive written a few months after the Woolfs’ wedding:

  They seemed very happy, but are evidently both a little exercised in their minds on the subject of the Goat’s coldness. [Virginia’s family nickname was Goat.] Apparently she still gets no pleasure at all from the act, which I think is curious. They were very anxious to know when I first had an orgasm. I couldn’t remember. Do you? But no doubt I sympathised with such things if I didn’t have them from the time I was 2.

  What makes Quentin’s biograp
hy such a remarkable work—one of the few biographies that overcome the congenital handicaps of the genre—is the force of his personality and the authority of his voice. He is perhaps more a butler than a chambermaid; he is certainly an upper servant. He has been with the family for a great number of years, and he is fiercely, profoundly loyal to it; he knows who are its friends and who its enemies. More important, he knows its members very well. He has carefully studied each of them for years; he has slowly turned their characters over in his mind for years, knowing their idiosyncrasies and weaknesses. He has been privy to their quarrels—the quarrels by which family life is defined and braced—and he has chosen sides, has discriminated and judged. In making his judgments and discriminations, he has picked up certain habits of mind from the family—habits of mind for which the family is famous—together with a certain tone. “The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power.” This statement, though made by E. M. Forster, might have been made by Quentin (or Vanessa or Virginia or Leonard or Clive or Lytton); it expresses the Bloomsbury ethos and is inflected in the Bloomsbury tone. Forster wrote these words in the essay “What I Believe,” in which he also unforgettably said, “If I had to choose between betraying my county and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country,” and held up “an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky.” Here is how Quentin administers justice to the despicable, power-abusing George Duckworth, who fondled Vanessa as well as Virginia, little thinking that he was earning himself a place in literary history as one of its lowest worms: