Forty-One False Starts

by Janet Malcolm

  The cold brought my thoughts to the winter of 1918–19, when Vanessa was in the house with Duncan and his boyfriend David Garnett—known as Bunny—and Julian and Quentin and her newborn baby by Duncan, Angelica. Much water had gone over the dam since Clive and Vanessa married and lived like great ladies in Gordon Square. Their marriage had effectively ended in 1914. Clive had reverted to his old ways of philandering; Vanessa had fallen in love with Roger Fry and had had an affair with him, which ended when she fell in love with Duncan. The war had brought Vanessa and Duncan and Bunny to Charleston. Duncan and Bunny, who were conscientious objectors, maintained their status by doing farm-work. Their first employment was restoring an old orchard, but when the military board required more seriously unpleasant farmwork Vanessa rented Charleston, so that Duncan and Bunny could work on the adjoining farm. Although Duncan was passionately in love with Bunny, he sometimes graciously consented to sleep with Vanessa when Bunny was away. Frances Spalding, in her biography of Vanessa, published in 1983, quoted a rather awful entry in Duncan’s diary of 1918, written during a five-day absence of Bunny’s:

  I copulated on Saturday with her with great satisfaction to myself physically. It is a convenient way, the females, of letting off one’s spunk and comfortable. Also the pleasure it gives is reassuring. You don’t get this dumb misunderstanding body of a person who isn’t a bugger. That’s one for you Bunny!

  Thus Angelica. She was born on Christmas Day of 1918, and in her first weeks she almost joined Julia and Stella and Thoby as a casualty of disastrously incompetent doctoring; the intervention of a new doctor saved her life. (Five years later, Virginia, writing in her diary of another near miss—Angelica had been knocked down by a car in London—described the terrible scene in a hospital ward with Vanessa and Duncan when it appeared certain that “death & tragedy had once more put down his paw, after letting us run a few paces.” Angelica turned out to be unharmed: “It was only a joke this time.”)

  After his appearance at Angelica’s cradleside, “the great cat” retreated, and Vanessa was allowed almost twenty more years of the happiness she had willed into being when she left Hyde Park Gate and painted the walls of 46 Gordon Square with distemper. “How much I admire this handling of life as if it were a thing one could throw about; this handling of circumstances,” her sister wrote about her, and “How masterfully she controls her dozen lives; never in a muddle, or desperate or worried; never spending a pound or a thought needlessly; yet with it all free, careless, airy, indifferent.”

  The man Vanessa had chosen to be her life’s partner is still a veiled character; our understanding of Duncan must await Frances Spalding’s biography, now in preparation. He seems to have been extremely good-looking and charming and disarming, as well as eccentrically vague, and perhaps somewhat selfish. He was six years younger than Vanessa, but she deferred to him as an artist; she considered herself several steps behind him. (This judgment was reflected in their relative positions in the British art world at the time; today, there seems less of a gap between their achievements.) He was one of the Bloomsbury aristocrats (he was Lytton’s cousin), as Bunny Garnett, for example, was not. Bunny went straight—or reverted to being straight—soon after Angelica’s birth. Duncan transferred his affections to another man, and to others after him, but he permanently remained Vanessa’s companion, and she gamely accepted the terms of his companionship. (From her letters to Duncan we may gather that these terms were rather hard ones, and that she was sometimes in a muddle and desperate and worried about how to maintain her equilibrium in the face of them.) Her relationship with Clive, meanwhile, was friendly and intimate, a sort of unsinister version of the relationship between the former lovers of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

  Vanessa’s remarkable domestic arrangement seems almost an inevitability: What could be a better riposte to Victorian hypocrisy and dreariness than a husband who brought his mistresses around for amused inspection and a lover who was gay? By any standard, the Bell-Grant household was a strange one, and in the 1920s there were still plenty of people who could find it excitingly scandalous. One of them was Madge Vaughan, an old family friend, ten years older than Vanessa, who was the daughter of John Addington Symonds. (Symonds, as it happens, was one of the biggest closet queens of the Victorian age, a fact that came out only years after his and Madge’s deaths.) In March 1920, Vanessa received a letter from Madge that made her, she said, “half amused and half furious.” The letter was written from Charleston, where Madge, in Vanessa’s absence, was staying briefly while deciding whether or not to rent the place for a long family holiday. “I love you & I am faithful to old friends,” Madge wrote, and she went on:

  I have set my back against slander and chatter and fought your battles always through the years. But I love, with increasing passion, Goodness, purity and homeliness & the hearts of little children are the holiest things I know on earth. And a question gnaws at my poor heart here in this house.

  It came stabbing my heart that day when I saw Angelica. I would like to meet you as a woman friend face to face at some quiet place and to talk it out. I don’t feel I could come and live here with Will and the children unless I had done this.

  Vanessa replied to this piece of flowery piety in prose as crushingly simple and elegant as the black gown Anna Karenina wore to the fateful opening ball:

  Why on earth should my moral character have anything to do with the question of your taking Charleston or not? I suppose you don’t always enquire into your landlord’s characters. However take it or not as you like . . .

  As for the gossip about me, as to which of course I have not been left in ignorance, I must admit that it seems to me almost incredibly impertinent of you to ask me to satisfy your curiosity about it. I cannot conceive why you think it any business of yours. I am absolutely indifferent to anything the world may say about me, my husband or my children. The only people whose opinion can affect one, the working classes, luckily have the sense for the most part to realise that they can know nothing of one’s private life and do not allow their speculations about what one does to interfere with their judgment as to what one is. The middle and upper classes are not so sensible. It does not matter as they have no power over one’s life.

  In her reply, poor Madge put her foot in it even further by saying she had not wanted to pry, oh, no—“I am too saddened by contact with mean, sometimes cruel & inquisitive minds to entertain any sort of mere idle ‘curiosity’ myself ”—but had only written from the Purest of Motives, “out of a sort of passionate longing to help those I love.”

  Vanessa, roused to even greater heights of weary contempt, replied:

  You say you offered me help, but surely that is not a true account of your motives, for had I shown any slightest sign of wishing for help or needing it? And did not you wish to talk to me really so that you might know what sort of person I was to whose house you proposed to take your children?

  That at any rate was the reason you seemed to give me for writing.

  Nor was there even the excuse that Clive and I were known to be on bad terms with each other. In that case (though I should probably not desire it) I could understand an old friend’s interference.

  But whatever the gossip about us may be, you must know that we see each other and are to all appearance friendly, so it should I think be assumed that we are in agreement on those matters which concern our intimate lives. You say you tell Will everything, although your married life has been full of restraints. What reason is there to think that I do not tell Clive everything? It is perhaps because we neither of us think much of the world’s will or opinion, or that a “conventional home” is necessarily a happy or good one, that my married life has not been full of constraints but, on the contrary, full of ease, freedom and complete confidence. Perhaps the peace and strength you talk of can come in other ways than by yielding to the will of the world. It seems to me at any rate rash to assume that it can’t, or in fact that there is ever any reason to think that those who f
orce themselves to lead lives according to convention or the will of others are more likely to be “good” (by which I mean to have good or noble feelings) than those who decide to live as seems to them best regardless of other standards.

  Vanessa writes wonderfully not only when she is eating someone alive, like Madge Vaughan, but throughout the volume of her letters. “You have a touch in letter-writing that is beyond me. Something unexpected, like coming round a corner in a rose garden and finding it still daylight,” Virginia wrote her in August 1908, and the description is right. About her own letters Virginia wrote, “I am either too formal, or too feverish,” and she is right there, too. Virginia was the great novelist, but Vanessa was the natural letter writer; she had a gift for letter writing just as she had for making houses beautiful and agreeable. Virginia’s letters have passages that surpass anything Vanessa could have written—set pieces that shimmer with her febrile genius—but they lack the ease and unself-consciousness (the qualities on which the epistolary genre draws for its life as a literary genre) by which Vanessa’s are consistently marked.

  Regina Marler, with her selections, has created a kind of novel-in-letters counterpart of Frances Spalding’s sympathetic biography. Each letter illustrates a facet of Vanessa’s character and advances the plot of her life. Her relationships with Virginia, Clive, Roger, Duncan, and Julian—the novel-in-letters’ other characters—are revealed in moving fullness. The death of Julian, at the age of twenty-nine, in the Spanish Civil War, is the dreadful event toward which the plot inexorably moves. On July 18, 1937, during the Battle of Brunete, he was hit by shrapnel and died of his wounds. Reading Vanessa’s letters to him in the two years before his death in the knowledge of what is coming is almost unbearable. In a letter written to him in China, where he was teaching, she writes, “Oh Julian, I can never express what happiness you’ve given me in my life. I often wonder how such luck has fallen my way. Just having children seemed such incredible delight, but that they should care for me as you make me feel you do, is something beyond all dreaming of—or even wanting. I never expected it or hoped for it, for it seemed enough to care so much oneself.” A year later, when he has begun to make plans to go to Spain, she writes, “I woke . . . from an awful nightmare about you, thinking you were dead, and waking saying ‘Oh, if only it could all be a dream.’ ” In July 1937, when, in spite of her anguished arguments, he has gone to Spain, she writes a long, witty letter about gatherings at Charleston and in London attended by, among others, Leonard, Virginia, Quentin, Angelica, T. S. Eliot, and Henri Matisse, and also by James, Dorothy, Pippa, Jane, and Pernel Strachey (“There was slightly overwhelming Strachey atmosphere”) and holds up as “extraordinarily sane and unanswerable” an article by Maynard in the New Statesman replying to Auden’s poem “Spain” and asserting the primacy of “the claims of Peace.” Reading the next letter in the book, dated August 11, to Ottoline Morrell, is unbearable.

  Dearest Ottoline,

  I was grateful for your little note. You will forgive me for not writing sooner. I am only beginning to be able to write any letters, but I wanted to thank you.

  Do you remember when we first knew each other telling me of your sorrow when your baby son died—I have never forgotten it.

  Yours, Vanessa

  In another short letter, written five days later, Vanessa acknowledges a condolence from Vita Sackville-West (her sister’s former lover) and says, “I cannot ever say how Virginia has helped me. Perhaps some day, not now, you will be able to tell her it’s true.” After Virginia’s suicide, in March 1941, Vanessa wrote to Vita again and came back to her letter of August 1937.

  I remember sending that message by you. I think I had a sort of feeling that it would have more effect if you gave it and I expect I was right. How glad I am you gave it. I remember all those days after I heard about Julian lying in an unreal state and hearing her voice going on and on keeping life going as it seemed when otherwise it would have stopped, and late every day she came to see me here, the only point in the day one could want to come.

  Virginia noted in her diary in September 1937, “Nessa’s little message: to me so profoundly touching, thus sent secretly via Vita that I have ‘helped’ her more than she can say.” The reversal of roles—Virginia now the strong dispenser of comfort and stability to the pitifully broken Vanessa—is one of the most beautiful and interesting moments in the Bloomsbury novel. Vanessa’s inability to tell Virginia directly of her love and gratitude is a measure of the depth of her reserve, the quality that gave her character its immense authority and her household its improbable peacefulness, which strangers sometimes mistook for hauteur, and her sister—emotional, wildly imaginative—for indifference.

  “I thought when Roger died that I was unhappy,” the devastated Vanessa said to Virginia after Julian’s death. Vanessa’s affair with Roger had begun in 1911 and had painfully (for him) ended in 1913, but, like Clive, Roger remained in Vanessa’s orbit and continued to function in her life as one of its fundamental structures. As well as a lover, he had been a mentor and a decisive artistic influence. His postimpressionist show of 1910 had introduced the then difficult art of Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Picasso, and Matisse, among others, to an obligingly derisive English public. (“The exhibition is either an extremely bad joke or a swindle,” Wilfred Blunt wrote in his diary. “The drawing is on the level of that of an untaught child of seven or eight years old, the sense of colour that of a tea-tray painter, the method that of a schoolboy who wipes his fingers on a slate after spitting on them.”) Perhaps the most remarkable of Vanessa’s letters to Roger is one she wrote in November 1918 (from Charleston, in the last month of her pregnancy with Angelica), recalling “that first part of our affair,” which was

  one of the most exciting times of my life, for apart from the new excitement about painting, finding for the first time someone whose opinion one cared for, who sympathised with and encouraged one, you know I really was in love with you and felt very intimate with you, and it is one of the most exciting things one can do to get to know another person really well. One can only do so, I think, if one’s in love with them, even though it may be true that one’s also then deluded about them—as I daresay you were about me. But I really loved and admired your character and I still do and I expect having been in love with you will always make me have a different feeling about you from what I could have had otherwise, in spite of all the difficulties that have happened since.

  Roger’s death, in 1934, of a heart attack after a fall, is almost as afflicting as Julian’s; Lytton’s, in 1932, of stomach cancer, is scarcely less so. Vanessa’s letters make us care about these long-dead real people in the way novelists make us care about their newly minted imaginary characters. We weep unashamedly when we read Vanessa’s letters reaching out to Dora Carrington, the woman who had been hopelessly in love with Lytton, as Vanessa was in love with Duncan, and to Helen Anrep, who had become Roger’s companion after he got over Vanessa. Why do books of letters move us as biographies do not? When we are reading a book of letters, we understand the impulse to write biographies, we feel the intoxication the biographer feels in working with primary sources, the rapture of firsthand encounters with another’s lived experience. But this intoxication, this rapture, does not carry over into the text of the biography; it dies on the way. Here, for example, is Virginia writing to Lytton from Cornwall in April 1908:

  Then Nessa and Clive and the Baby and the Nurse all came, and we have been so domestic that I have not read, or wrote . . . A child is the very devil—calling out, as I believe, all the worst and least explicable passions of the parents—and the Aunts. When we talk of marriage, friendship or prose, we are suddenly held up by Nessa, who has heard a cry, and then we must all distinguish whether it is Julian’s cry, or the cry of the 2 year old, who has an abscess, and uses therefore a different scale.

  And here is Frances Spalding:

  If Clive was irritated and frustrated, Virginia was experiencing a more agonizin
g sense of real loss. In Cornwall both were infuriated by Vanessa’s habit of interrupting the conversation in order to discern whether it was Julian or the landlady’s two-year-old who was crying. The caterwauling increased their discomfort.

  Or Vanessa writing to Clive on October 12, 1921:

  Our arrival in Paris was thrilling. You will be sorry you missed Quentin’s first sight of Paris. He and I stood in the corridor to see it and he told me he was most anxious to see what it was like as he expected to live there some day. He was wild with excitement, taking in everything with eyes staring out of his head, especially as we crossed the Seine, which did look most lovely. He thought all the colours so different from England, though it was dark and there was not much to be seen but coloured lights.