Forty-One False Starts

by Janet Malcolm

  In later years Virginia’s and Vanessa’s friends were a little astonished at the unkind mockery, the downright virulence with which the sisters referred to their half-brother. He seemed to be a slightly ridiculous, but on the whole an inoffensive old buffer, and so, in a sense, he was. His public face was amiable. But to his half-sisters he stood for something horrible and obscene, the final element of foulness in what was already an appalling situation. More than that, he came to pollute the most sacred of springs, to defile their very dreams. A first experience of loving or being loved may be enchanting, desolating, embarrassing or even boring; but it should not be disgusting. Eros came with a commotion of leathern wings, a figure of mawkish incestuous sexuality. Virginia felt that George had spoilt her life before it had fairly begun. Naturally shy in sexual matters, she was from this time terrified back into a posture of frozen and defensive panic.

  When Quentin judges his family, when he feels that one of its members hasn’t behaved well (George wasn’t a true family member), he reproves her (or him) as a nineteenth-century novelist might reprove a heroine (or hero)—as Jane Austen reproves Emma, say, when Emma has been thoughtlessly cruel to Miss Bates. This is the tone Quentin adopts in writing of Virginia’s flirtation with Clive. He writes with a kind of loving disapproval, he feels that the whole thing was wrong because it was hurtful, but he sympathizes—as Jane Austen sympathized—with the impulse to heedlessly amuse oneself. He also sympathizes with Virginia’s feeling of being left out of her sister’s life after Vanessa’s marriage. “She was not in the least in love with Clive,” Quentin writes, “in so far as she was in love with anyone she was in love with Vanessa . . . It was because she loved Vanessa so much that she had to injure her, to enter and in entering to break that charmed circle within which Vanessa and Clive were so happy and by way of which she was so cruelly excluded, and to have Vanessa for herself again by detaching the husband who, after all, was not worthy of her.”

  What makes Bloomsbury of such continuing interest to us—why we emit the obligatory groan when the word is uttered but then go out and buy the latest book about Virginia and Vanessa and Leonard and Clive and Lytton and Roger and the rest—is that these people are so alive. The legend of Bloomsbury has taken on the dense complexity of a sprawling nineteenth-century novel, and its characters have become as real to us as the characters in Emma and Daniel Deronda and The Eustace Diamonds. Other early-modernist writers and artists, whose talents were at least equal to the Bloomsbury talents (except Virginia’s), recede from view, but the Bloomsbury writers and artists grow ever more biographically prominent. Were their lives really so fascinating, or is it simply because they wrote so well and so incessantly about themselves and one another that we find them so? Well, the latter, of course. No life is more interesting than any other life; everybody’s life takes place in the same twenty-four hours of consciousness and sleep; we are all locked into our subjectivity, and who is to say that the thoughts of a person gazing into the vertiginous depths of a volcano in Sumatra are more objectively interesting than those of a person trying on a dress at Bloomingdale’s? The remarkable collective achievement of the Bloomsbury writers and artists was that they placed in posterity’s hands the documents necessary to engage posterity’s feeble attention—the letters, memoirs, and journals that reveal inner life and compel the sort of helpless empathy that fiction compels.

  Toward the end of “A Sketch of the Past,” there is a beautiful and difficult passage about the tendency Virginia has noticed in herself to write about the past in scenes:

  I find that scene-making is my natural way of marking the past. A scene always comes to the top; arranged; representative. This confirms me in my instinctive notion—it is irrational; it will not stand argument—that we are sealed vessels afloat upon what it is convenient to call reality; at some moments, without a reason, without an effort, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality; that is a scene—for they would not survive entire so many ruinous years unless they were made of something permanent; that is a proof of their “reality.” Is this liability of mine to scene-receiving the origin of my writing impulse?

  At this point, Virginia, like the reader, begins to sense some of the problems with the passage: the confusion between “scene-making” and “scene-receiving” (which is it?) and the wobbliness of the word “reality,” which totters from “what it is convenient to call reality” to plain “reality” to “ ‘reality.’ ” “These are questions about reality, about scenes and their connection with writing to which I have no answer; nor time to put the question carefully,” she writes, and adds, “Perhaps if I should revise and rewrite as I intend, I will make the question more exact; and worry out something by way of answer.” Virginia died before she could revise and rewrite the passage, and students of autobiography and biography are still worrying about the subject of “reality” versus reality—the made versus the received. But there is no question that the hyper-reality of the famous scenes in the Bloomsbury legend, like those of classical fiction, derives from a common artistic tradition and from certain technologies of storytelling, by which the wrought is made to appear as if it were the received. We call the tradition realism; the technologies are unnameable.

  Virginia wrote “A Sketch of the Past” in spurts, between April 1939 and November 1940, as a diversion from a project that was giving her trouble—her biography of Roger Fry, the critic and painter who had introduced postimpressionist art to England. After writing the passage about scenes, she put the “Sketch” aside for a month, and when she returned to it she felt constrained to add, “Scenes, I note, seldom illustrate my relationship with Vanessa; it had been too deep for ‘scenes.’ ”

  Virginia and Vanessa’s relationship was deep indeed—perhaps the deepest of all the Bloomsbury relationships. But it was not, in fact, impervious to—“too deep for”—Virginia’s scenic imagination. In a letter to Violet Dickinson, for example, she gives this picture of Vanessa a month before her marriage, as she observed her in Bath walking down the street arm in arm with Clive: “She had a gauze streamer, red as blood flying over her shoulder, a purple scarf, a shooting cap, tweed skirt and great brown boots. Then her hair swept across her forehead, and she was tawny and jubilant and lusty as a young God.”

  It is the implicit comparison between the watcher and the watched, between the fragile and wistful Virginia and the powerful and sexually magnetic Vanessa, that gives the scene its novelistic shimmer. In Virginia’s vision of her sister—it gleams out of her letters and diaries—Vanessa is a Kate Coy or Charlotte Stant to her own Milly Theale or Maggie Verver; she has not only the physical magnificence of James’s wonderful “bad” heroines, whose robust beauty and splendid bearing so pointedly contrast with the slouching delicacy of the “good” heroines, but also their double-edged single-mindedness. (“You are much simpler that I am,” Virginia wrote to Vanessa in August 1909. “How do you manage to see only one thing at a time? Without any of those reflections that distract me so much and make people call me bad names? I suppose you are, as Lytton once said, the most complete human being of us all; and your simplicity is really that you take in much more than I do, who intensify atoms.”) Although it was Virginia/Milly/Maggie who had wronged Vanessa/Kate/Charlotte in the Clive affair, Virginia never ceased to feel obscurely wronged by her sister; she perpetually compared herself to Vanessa and found herself wanting. In June 1929, when she and Leonard joined Vanessa and Duncan in the South of France, she wrote in her diary of buying furniture and crockery for her country house in England; although it gave her pleasure, it “set my dander up against Nessa’s almost overpowering supremacy. My elder son is coming tomorrow; yes, & he is the most promising young man in King’s; & has been speaking at the Apostles’ dinner. All I can oppose that with is, And I made £2,000 out of Orlando & can bring Leonard here & buy a house if I want. To which she replies (in the same inaudible way) I am a failure as a painter compared with you, & can’t do more than pay for my models. And so we go on; ov
er the depths of our childhood.”

  In 1926, after going to a show of Vanessa’s paintings, Virginia wrote to her sister, “I am amazed, a little alarmed (for as you have children, the fame by rights belongs to me) by your combinations of pure artistic vision and brilliance of imagination.” Of course, it is the parenthetical remark that leaps out of the passage. The fame is a poor thing, a devalued second best to the children. Vanessa is always the alarmingly invulnerable big sister, even though Virginia is capable of condescending to her when she feels particularly provoked. “What you miss [in Clive] is inspiration of any kind,” she complained to Violet Dickinson, adding, “But then old Nessa is no genius.” Vanessa would have been the first to agree; extreme modesty about her intellectual, and even artistic, attainments was one of her outstanding traits—and perhaps only added to her insufferable superiority in the eyes of her sister. In a memoir called “Reminiscences,” addressed to the yet unborn Julian, Virginia shows us Vanessa behaving in girlhood as she would throughout her life: “When she won the prize at her drawing school, she hardly knew, so shy was she, at the recognition of a secret, how to tell me, in order that I might repeat the news at home. ‘They’ve given me the thing—I don’t know why.’ ‘What thing?’ ‘O they say I’ve won it—the book—the prize you know.’ ”

  When Vanessa married, it was not she but Virginia and Adrian who were expelled from Gordon Square and had to “forage for some flat somewhere.” “Nessa & Clive live, as I think, much like great ladies in a French salon; they have all the wits & the poets; & Nessa sits among them like a Goddess,” Virginia wrote at about the time she and Adrian gave a party at Fitzroy Square whose high point was a dog being sick on the carpet. When Virginia accepted Leonard, it may have been, as Quentin characterizes it, “the wisest decision of her life,” but it did not sweep her up and elevate her to the domestic rank of her sister. Vanessa’s household remained the principal residence of the Bloomsbury court, and Virginia’s was always secondary, an annex. In view of the fact that the Woolf marriage was a strong and lasting one, and the Bell marriage fell apart after only a few years, it is curious that this was so. But it was so. There was always something a little forlorn and tentative about Virginia and Leonard’s household. There were, of course, the bouts of mental illness that Virginia suffered and Leonard nursed her through, which could not but leave in the air of the house their residue of tension and fear. But there was also the fact that Vanessa was a born chatelaine and Virginia was not. Virginia couldn’t buy a penwiper without enduring agonies of indecision. As a result, though it is Virginia’s literary achievement that has given Bloomsbury its place in cultural history, it is Vanessa’s house that has become Bloomsbury’s shrine.

  Charleston Farmhouse, in Sussex, which Vanessa began to rent in 1916 as a country retreat, and where she and Duncan and (sometimes) Clive lived together for extended periods, was restored in the 1980s and opened to the public. In twentieth-century art, Vanessa and Duncan occupy a minor niche, but their decorations within the farmhouse, painted on door panels, fireplaces, windows, walls, and furniture, convinced some of the keepers of the Bloomsbury flame that the place should be preserved after the death of the ménage’s last surviving member—Duncan—in 1978. A trust was formed, money was raised, and the place is now a museum, complete with a gift shop, teas, lectures, a twice-yearly magazine, and a summer-study program. Without the decorations, it is doubtful whether the house would have been preserved. Because of them, the legend of Bloomsbury has a site: readers of the novel of Bloomsbury need no longer imagine; they can now actually enter the rooms where some of the most dramatic scenes took place, can look out the windows the characters looked out of, can tread on the carpets they trod on and stroll in the garden they strolled in. It is as if Mansfield Park itself had been opened up to us as an accompaniment to our reading of the novel.

  I visited Charleston last December on an extremely cold, gray day and immediately felt its Chekhovian beauty and sadness. The place has been preserved in its worn and faded and stained actuality. It is an artist’s house, a house where an eye has looked into every corner and hovered over every surface, considering what will please it to look at every day—an eye that had been educated by Paris ateliers and villas in the South of France and is not gladdened by English prettiness. But it is also a house of an Englishwoman (an Englishwoman who, on arriving at her rented house in St.-Tropez in 1921, wrote to Maynard Keynes in London to ask him to send a dozen packages of oatmeal, ten seven-pound tins of marmalade, four pounds of tea, and “some potted meat”)—a house where sagging armchairs covered with drooping slipcovers of faded print fabric are tolerated, and where even a certain faint dirtiness is cultivated. In a letter to Roger Fry about a house belonging to the American painters Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson (who had commissioned Vanessa and Duncan to decorate its loggia), Vanessa mocked the “rarefaction” and “spotless order” of the place. “Nan makes muslin covers to receive the flies’ excrements (I don’t believe Nan and Ethel have any—they never go to the W.), everything has yards and yards of fresh muslin and lace and silk festooned on it and all seems to be washed and ironed in the night,” she wrote, and sighed for “a breath from one’s home dirt.” Vanessa’s houses were never rarefied or dainty, but neither were they artless congeries of possessions, which was what she coldly judged Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington to be: “To me it seems simply a collection of objects she likes put together with enormous energy but not made into anything.”

  Making things—visual or literary—was Bloomsbury’s dominating passion. It was also, in a paradoxical way, its link to the nineteenth-century past that it was at such pains to repudiate. In their compulsive work habits, the Bloomsbury modernists were behaving exactly as their Victorian parents and grandparents had behaved. There is a moment in Virginia’s “Reminiscences” that goes by so fast we may not immediately grasp what it has let drop about the iron hold that the work ethic had on the nineteenth-century mind. Writing of the excesses of grief to which Leslie Stephen was driven by the sudden death of Julia—“There was something in the darkened rooms, the groans, the passionate lamentations that passed the normal limits of sorrow . . . He was like one who, by the failure of some stay, reels staggering blindly about the world, and fills it with his woe”—Virginia pauses to recall Stella’s strenuous efforts to distract the grief-stricken widower: “All her diplomacy was needed to keep him occupied in some way, when his morning’s work was over.” When his morning’s work was over. Sir Leslie may have been staggering blindly about the world, but the world would have had to come to an end before he missed a morning at his writing table. Even when he was dying of bowel cancer, he continued to produce startling quantities of prose daily. Leonard, in the fourth volume of his autobiography, spells out what for Virginia went without saying:

  We should have felt it to be not merely wrong, but unpleasant not to work every morning for seven days a week and for about eleven months a year. Every morning, therefore, at about 9:30 after breakfast each of us, as if moved by a law of unquestioned nature, went off and “worked” until lunch at 1. It is surprising how much one can produce in a year, whether of buns or books or pots or pictures, if one works hard and professionally for three and a half hours every day for 330 days. That was why, despite her disabilities, Virginia was able to produce so very much.

  (In volume V, lest any reader suppose that Leonard and Virginia spent the rest of the day in effete pleasure, he points out that with reviewing, reading for reviewing, and, in Virginia’s case, thinking about work in progress or future work—and in his own case, running the Hogarth Press and serving on political committees—they actually worked ten or twelve hours a day.)

  At Charleston, from which other spirits have fled and can now be conjured only by letters and diaries, the spirit of industry remains a felt presence. If the place is Chekhovian—as perhaps all country houses situated in precariously unspoiled country, with walled gardens and fruit trees and not enough bathrooms, are—it is not o
f Chekhovian idleness and theatricality that it speaks but, rather, of the values by which Chekhov’s good characters are ruled: patient, habitual work and sensible, calm behavior. (Chekhov was a kind of Bloomsburian himself.) Charleston is dominated by its workplace—its studios and studies and the bedrooms to which guests retired to write. The communal rooms were only two in number—the living room (called the garden room) and the dining room—and were modest in size. They were not the house’s hearth. That title belonged to the huge ground-floor studio, where for many years Vanessa and Duncan painted side by side, every day. (In Vanessa’s later years she worked in a new studio, in the attic; after her death, Duncan, who stayed on in the house, gradually made the downstairs studio his living quarters.)

  The ubiquitous decorations only extend our sense of Charleston as a place of incessant, calm productivity. They give the house its unique appearance, but they do not impose upon it. They belong to the world of high art and design, the world of postimpressionist painting and early-modernist design, and yet, quite mysteriously, they are of a piece with the English farmhouse that contains them and with the English countryside that enters each room through large, old-fashioned windows. During my tour of the house, I was drawn to the windows as if by a tropism. Today, we come to the house to see the decorations and the paintings that Clive and Vanessa and Duncan collected as well as the ones that Vanessa and Duncan produced; but what Clive and Vanessa and Duncan looked at when they entered a room was the walled garden and a willow and the pond and the fields beyond, and as I looked out of the windows they had looked out of, I felt their presence even more strongly than I had when examining their handiwork and their possessions. I visited the house on a day when it was closed to the public, in the company of Christopher Naylor, then the director of the Charleston Trust, who was at least as well acquainted with the novel of Bloomsbury as I was, and who called its characters by their first names, as I have done here—biographical research leads to a kind of insufferable familiarity. After the tour—which rang with “Christophers” and “Janets” as well as with “Clives” and “Duncans” and “Maynards”—my guide tactfully withdrew to allow me to commune alone with the ghosts of the house and to take notes on the decorations. Taking notes proved impossible: after an hour in the unheated house I could no longer move my fingers.