Forty-One False Starts

by Janet Malcolm

  And Spalding:

  On the journey out her chief pleasure lay in watching her son’s response to all that they saw. As the train approached Paris she stood in the corridor with Quentin awaiting the first sight of the city for, as he told her in his most ceremonious manner, he was most anxious to see it as he expected to live there one day.

  There is nothing wrong with what Spalding has written in these extracts. They illustrate normal biographical method. The genre (like its progenitor, history) functions as a kind of processing plant where experience is converted into information the way fresh produce is converted into canned vegetables. But, like canned vegetables, biographical narratives are so far removed from their source—so altered from the plant with soil clinging to its roots that is a letter or a diary entry—that they carry little conviction. When Virginia complains to Lytton (another high-strung, single, childless intellectual) about what a nuisance the baby is, her voice carries great conviction, and so does Vanessa’s when she proudly exclaims over her young son’s aestheticism to his aesthete father. When Spalding writes, “In Cornwall both were infuriated,” and “On the journey out her chief pleasure lay,” we do not quite believe her. Taken from its living context, and with its blood drained out of it, the “information” of biographies is a shriveled, spurious thing. The canniest biographers, aware of the problem, rush massive transfusions of quotation to the scene. The biographies that give the greatest illusion of life, the fullest sense of their subject, are those that quote the most. Spalding’s biography is one of these, as is Quentin’s—though Quentin, in any case, is exempt from the above criticisms because his nephew’s and son’s voice carries the authority that no stranger-biographer’s voice can. His acute critical intelligence is always being inflected by a fond familial feeling; this does not so much blunt his judgments as give them a kind of benign finality. (When Virginia once characterized an affectionate letter of Quentin’s mother as “exquisitely soft and just, like the fall of a cat’s paw,” she could have been describing her nephew’s biography.)

  The judgments of Quentin’s half sister, Angelica, have a rather different atmosphere. Angelica appears in Vanessa’s letters and Virginia’s diaries as a radiant, impish child, and then as a beautiful, piquant young woman—a kind of crown of Vanessa’s maternal achievement, the lovely flower who provided the “feminine element” (as Vanessa termed it) that the family required to reach its final perfection. But in her book Deceived with Kindness (1985), Angelica, now a rather defeated older woman, comes forward to correct our admiring vision of Vanessa and to bring the Bloomsbury legend into line with our blaming and self-pitying times. Angelica is a kind of reincarnation of Madge Vaughan; what Madge adumbrated in her piously accusing letters to Vanessa, Angelica elaborates in her angry and aggrieved book about Vanessa. Madge felt that she could not bring her husband and children to live in a house of such irregularity; Angelica confirms her misgivings. Bloomsbury bohemianism was evidently lost on its youngest heir, who never felt at ease with her family, and would have infinitely preferred to grow up in a household like Madge’s, where the children came first and you were unlikely to one day discover that your mother’s lover was your real father. The relationship between Duncan and Vanessa—regarded by Spalding and other Bloomsbury aficionados as a testament to Vanessa’s magisterial free-spiritedness and as an extraordinarily fruitful artistic union—is regarded by Angelica as simply disreputable and pathological. (“There must have been a strong element of masochism in her love for him, which induced her to accept a situation which did permanent harm to her self-respect . . . She gained companionship with a man she loved on terms unworthy of her whole self.”) In 1917 Roger wrote to Vanessa,

  You have done such an extraordinarily difficult thing without any fuss, but thro’ all the conventions kept friends with a pernickety creature like Clive, got quit of me and yet kept me your devoted friend, got all the things you need for your own development and yet managed to be a splendid mother . . . You have a genius in your life as well as in your art and both are rare things.

  Angelica denies that Vanessa was a splendid mother and believes Vanessa’s life was a shambles. Her book introduces into the Bloomsbury legend the most jarring shift in perspective. Until the publication of Deceived with Kindness the legend had a smooth, unbroken surface. Efforts from the outside to penetrate it—I think of such books as Louise DeSalvo’s Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (1989) and Roger Poole’s less crude but almost as dark and accusing The Unknown Virginia Woolf (1978)—succeeded no better than did Madge’s and other interfering busybodies’ attempt to “help” where no help had been requested.

  But Angelica’s attack from within is something else. It is a primary document; it cannot be pushed aside, unpleasant and distasteful though it is to see a minor character arise from her corner and proceed to put herself in the center of a rather marvelous story that now threatens to become ugly. An unhappy Quentin attempted to do a little damage control in a review of Deceived with Kindness that was first published in Books and Bookmen and then in the Charleston Newsletter. Treading carefully (“Ought a brother to review his sister’s book? Certainly it is an awkward undertaking, made all the more awkward when, as in the present instance, one cannot but express admiration”) but firmly (“To say that this is an honest narrative is not to say that it is accurate”), Quentin tries to correct the correction and restore the Bloomsbury story to its old dignity and high style. Occasionally, his irritation with his irritating little sister gets the better of his tact, as when he notes, “My sister was the only young person I then [in the thirties] knew who seemed to take not the slightest interest in politics.” He goes on:

  The non-political person must of necessity see the world in terms of personality and individual responsibility, hence of praise or blame. The impersonality of politics which Angelica saw as something inhuman can also lead to milder moral judgments . . . I was sorry for my sister coming as she did to her majority just as the last hopes of peace in Europe vanished, [but] she, as these pages show, had quite other misfortunes to preoccupy her mind.

  More than anything else, it is the tone of Angelica’s book that sets it apart from other Bloomsbury texts. The note of irony—perhaps because it resounded too insistently in her ears when she was growing up—is entirely absent from her text, an absence that brings into relief Bloomsbury’s characteristic obliqueness. Virginia, writing of sorrows at least as afflicting as Angelica’s, never allows her stoicism to falter, and rarely fails to hang on to some shred of her natural gaiety. Her niece writes under inspiration of different spirits. When Angelica says that Vanessa

  never realised that, by denying me my real father she was treating me even before my birth as an object, and not as a human being. No wonder she always felt guilt and I resentment, even though I did not understand the true reason for it; no wonder too that she tried to make it up to me by spoiling me, and in so doing only inhibited me. As a result I was emotionally incapacitated.

  we withhold our sympathy—as we withheld it from Madge Vaughan—not because her grievance is without merit, but because her language is without force. As Madge cloaked and muffled the complexity and legitimacy of her fears for her children in the ornate pieties of the Victorian period (which she had brought with her into the 1920s), so Angelica cloaks and muffles the complexity and legitimacy of her fury at her mother in the streamlined truisms of the age of mental health.

  The man Angelica married (and separated from after many unhappy years) was—the reader who doesn’t already know this will fall out of his chair—Bunny Garnett. On the day Angelica was born, Bunny, who was then ensconced at Charleston as Duncan’s lover, wrote to Lytton about the new baby: “Its beauty is the remarkable thing about it. I think of marrying it; when she is twenty I shall be 46—will it be scandalous?” That Bunny’s prophecy should have come true is a twist that seems to belong to another plot, but that Bunny and Angelica gravitated toward each other is not so
remarkable. Like Angelica, Bunny never really belonged among the Bloomsbury aristocrats. Vanessa put up with him because of Duncan; Lytton and Virginia jeered at his (now hopelessly dated) novels. (In her diary for 1925, Virginia quotes Lytton on Bunny’s latest work: “Really it’s very extraordinary—so arty,—so composed—the competence terrific, but . . . well, it’s like a perfectly restored Inn—Ye Olde Cocke and Balls, everything tidied up & restored.”) Bunny’s three-volume autobiography is permeated with complacency and an air of bogusness. Every literary society has its Bunny, it seems; so often the least talented member comes forward as its noisiest, and most knowing, self-appointed and self-important spokesman.

  In what I have written, in separating my Austenian heroines and heroes from my Gogolian flat characters, I have, like every other biographer, conveniently forgotten that I am not writing a novel, and that it really isn’t for me to say who is good and who is bad, who is noble and who is faintly ridiculous. Life is infinitely less orderly and more bafflingly ambiguous than any novel, and if we pause to remember that Madge and Bunny, and even George and Gerald Duckworth, were actual, multidimensional individuals, whose parents loved them and whose lives were of inestimable preciousness to themselves, we have to face the problem that every biographer faces and none can solve; namely that he is standing in quicksand as he writes. There is no floor under his enterprise, no basis for moral certainty. Every character in a biography contains within himself or herself the potential for a reverse image. The finding of a new cache of letters, the stepping forward of a new witness, the coming into fashion of a new ideology—all these events, and particularly the last one, can destabilize any biographical configuration, overturn any biographical consensus, transform any good character into a bad one, and vice versa. The manuscript of Deceived with Kindness was made available to Frances Spalding during the writing of her biography of Vanessa, and though she does not ignore it, she chooses not to allow it to sour her affectionate portrait. Another biographer might have made—a subsequent biographer may well make—a different choice. The distinguished dead are clay in the hands of writers, and chance determines the shapes that their actions and characters assume in the books written about them.

  After my inspection of the Charleston house, a walk in the walled garden (which somehow seemed warmer than the icy house), and a visit to the gift shop, I rejoined Christopher Naylor, and, as had been arranged, we drove off for tea with Anne Olivier Bell, Quentin’s wife, who is known as Olivier. Quentin would not be at tea, Christopher told me; he was frail and napped in the afternoon. The couple live in a house a mile away, which, like Charleston, is on a huge estate belonging to a Lord Gage, who has managed to hang on to his property (is this why one thinks of The Cherry Orchard while at Charleston?) and is one of the supporters of the Charleston Trust. When we arrived at the Bell house, at about four-thirty, it was already dark. Olivier ushered us into a large, warm room with a kitchen at one end and, at the other, a fireplace in which a fire was robustly burning. A long wooden table stood in front of the fire. Olivier is a tall, vigorous woman in her late seventies, with an appealing shy friendliness. One is immediately drawn to her warmth and naturalness, her sensible and matter-of-fact manner, her extreme niceness. She put a kettle on the hob and then showed me (as if this were what her visitors expected) various paintings by Bloomsbury artists. One was a large portrait of Vanessa in a red evening dress with one arm raised voluptuously over her head, painted by Duncan in 1915, and another was Vanessa’s portrait of Quentin as a little boy of eight, looking up in the act of writing in a notebook. Neither these paintings nor any of the others was hung to advantage: the portrait of Vanessa was in a hallway at the bottom of a staircase, on a wall too small for it, and the portrait of Quentin, though not quite so badly placed, was not right, either. In Deceived with Kindness, Angelica bitterly writes of how “appearances of a purely aesthetic kind were considered of supreme importance” at Charleston (“Hours were spent hanging an old picture in a new place, or in choosing a new colour for the walls”), while she herself was allowed to go out into the world unbrushed and unwashed. Quentin and Olivier’s house was entirely without the aestheticism of Charleston. It was comfortable, pleasant, and inviting but aesthetically unremarkable: this was not where their interests lay. Vanessa’s dining table at Charleston was round, and she had painted a design on it in yellow, gray, and pink, evocative of the covers she did for Virginia’s Hogarth Press books, which for some readers are inextricably bound up with reading Virginia’s novels and essays. Quentin and Olivier’s table was plain scrubbed wood. Olivier served tea at this table in large earthenware mugs made by Quentin, who, in addition to writing, painting, and teaching, is a potter.

  We heard some thumping overhead, and Olivier said, “That’s Quentin,” and he presently appeared—drawn by curiosity, perhaps. He is a tall man with white hair and a white beard, and he was wearing an artist’s smock the color of his blue eyes, which looked at one with a direct, calm gaze. He walked with a cane, with some difficulty. Like Olivier, Quentin immediately pulled one into his orbit of decency, sanity, wholesomeness, fineness. He had a bit of an aura. I asked him what he had thought of Angelica’s book. He laughed, and said he had been irritated by Angelica’s telling stories he would have wanted to tell himself and getting them wrong, missing the point. He said that the book had been a part of her therapy, and that today she would rewrite it if she could. I asked him a question about Clive. During my tour of Charleston, I had been struck by the amount of space Clive occupied in the house—he had a downstairs study, an upstairs library, a bedroom, and his own bathroom—and had noted the special character of his rooms. They aren’t out of character with the rest of the place—they are decorated with Duncan and Vanessa’s usual painted panels, windowsills, bed boards, and bookcases—but they are more elegant and more luxurious. The bedroom has an expensive carpet and a pair of ornate Venetian chairs; the study has an elaborate early-nineteenth-century marquetry table. (It had been a wedding present to Clive and Vanessa from his parents.) Clive had evidently wanted his little comforts and conveniences, and had got them. Everybody except poor Angelica seemed to have got what he or she wanted at Charleston. (“The atmosphere is one of liberty and order,” Angelica’s daughter Henrietta Garnett has written of visits to Charleston during her childhood.) Quentin said of Clive that he was an extremely complex person, and that he had been very fond of him and had taken great pleasure in his company until they fell out over politics.

  “Clive was conservative?” I asked. (I had not yet read Quentin’s Bloomsbury, in which he writes sharply of Clive’s book Civilisation, published in 1928: “It seemed that Clive Bell felt it more important to order a good meal than to know how to lead a good life,” and “Clive Bell sees civilisation as something that exists only in an élite and from which the helots who serve that élite are permanently excluded. The manner in which civilisation is to be preserved is immaterial; if it can be maintained by a democracy so much the better, but there is no fundamental objection to a tyranny so long as it maintains a cultured class with unearned incomes.”)

  “Conservative is putting it very mildly,” Quentin said. “You could almost say he was Fascistic.”

  “Then he and Julian must have fallen out even more,” I said.

  “Well, no,” Quentin said. He explained that he himself was the more left wing of the brothers—in fact, the most left wing of all the Bloomsbury set, though he never joined the Communist Party.

  I said that I had assumed Julian’s extreme leftness because of his going to Spain in 1937.

  “That is a common misconception about Julian,” Quentin said, and he went on, “Julian liked wars. He was a very austere person.” As Quentin talked about his brother, I felt that he was answering, in part, a question that had “stabbed my heart” when I was reading Vanessa’s extraordinarily intimate letters. Some of them, as she herself was aware, were almost love letters, and I had wondered what Quentin’s feelings had been as the less obse
ssively loved son who had survived the favorite’s death. But I did not pursue the point. Quentin has negotiated the feat of presiding over the Bloomsbury biographical industry while keeping himself out of the Bloomsbury narrative. He has offered only the barest indication of how he felt when he was growing up in his mother’s remarkable household. He is mentioned in the family letters and memoirs and diary entries, of course, but the references are rather sparse and uninformative. (In a few of the Bloomsbury photographs in which he appears we glimpse some of the charm and merriness of the author of Virginia Woolf.) He is almost a kind of generic younger son; Julian is always more visible and more fussed over. Julian’s large shadow may have given Quentin’s character the protection it needed to flourish outside the family orbit. For whatever reason, Quentin has succeeded in living his own life and keeping his own counsel. Now, in his mid-eighties, he evidently feels it safe (as his uncle Leonard felt it safe in his eighties) to break his silence and donate his person to the Bloomsbury novel. He has written a memoir, to be published in England in the fall.

  Among the books I had bought in the Charleston gift shop (I noticed that neither DeSalvo’s nor Poole’s book was on sale there) was a thin pamphlet called Editing Virginia Woolf’s Diary in which Olivier writes of her experiences as the editor of the diaries that Virginia kept between 1915 and 1941. Their publication, in five volumes, has earned her the highest praise for the excellence of their annotations. In the pamphlet, Olivier writes with a voice as distinct as Quentin’s, and with a tart note of her own about the invasions of scholars and journalists that followed the publication of Virginia Woolf: