Forty-One False Starts

by Janet Malcolm

  The house became a sort of honey-pot with all these Woolf addicts buzzing around. I had to provide some of the honey in the form of food and drink. Earnest seekers after the truth armed with tape recorders came from Tokyo, Belgrade, or Barcelona; others we came to refer to as “beard-touchers”—those for whom it was obligatory to be able to state “I consulted with Professor Bell” when submitting their doctoral dissertations on Mythic Patterns in “Flush” or whatever it might be.

  She allows herself a bitter comment: “We have sometimes found it hurtful to read articles or reviews by those we have entertained and informed and given up our time to, to the effect that we operated a sort of Bloomsbury closed shop—a protection racket maintained for the purposes of self-aggrandisement and financial gain.” (As Olivier points out in the acknowledgments to volume IV of the diaries, their full publication was possible only because Quentin’s share of the royalties issuing from the copyright of Virginia’s writings, which he and Angelica inherited from Leonard, were used to pay the costs.) Olivier’s tartest comments, however, are reserved for the revisionist works “purporting to demonstrate that both Leonard and Quentin had completely misrepresented [Virginia], and by concealing or cooking the evidence to which only they had access, had been able to present their preferred image—and one in which Leonard himself figured as hero.” She goes on, “Perhaps the most grotesque manifestations of this line of approach have been those which discern that it was the fundamental antagonism, sometimes fuelled by Virginia’s alleged anti-semitism, between her and Leonard which drove her, not only to periods of despair, but to suicide; indeed, it has been suggested that he practically pushed her into the river.”

  I have to confess that I did not buy Editing Virginia Woolf’s Diary because I expected it to be interesting. The title is about as enticing as a piece of dry brown bread. What enticed me was the pamphlet’s cover, which reproduces one of the minor but, in their way, momentous visual pleasures of the Charleston house. This pleasure—lying on a table beside an armchair in the living room—is a book on whose front cover someone (Duncan, it turns out) has pasted a few geometric shapes of hand-colored paper to form a most handsome and authoritative abstraction of olive green, umber, black, ocher, and blue. The book is a volume of plays of J. M. Synge, inscribed to Duncan from Clive in 1913. Why Duncan decorated it thus, no one knows—perhaps a child had put a glass of milk on it and left a ring, perhaps Duncan just felt like making a collage that day. Whatever its impetus, Duncan’s little project comes down to us (Olivier told me she had pulled the book back from the brink of consignment to Sotheby’s) as an emblem of the spirit of unceasing, unself-conscious—you could almost say artless—art making by which Charleston was inhabited.

  Sitting beside me at the long, scrubbed table, Quentin returned to Angelica’s book and to a photograph of Vanessa she included in it, which distressed him perhaps more than anything else in it. “Now, why did she put that picture in?” he said. “It’s the only photograph of Vanessa I’ve ever seen that makes her look ugly. Do you agree?”

  I said I did. The picture shows a grim old woman (it is dated 1951, when Vanessa was seventy-two) with thinning gray hair and round black-rimmed glasses; her mouth is turned down at the corners, and she is returning the camera’s pitiless gaze with a kind of wounded directness. The photograph bears no resemblance to others of Vanessa that appear in Angelica’s book, or to photographs of her that appear in any other Bloomsbury books. Nothing remains in it of the determined schoolgirl of Hyde Park Gate or the beautiful girl in white whom Leonard saw at Cambridge or the serene woman looking up from an easel or presiding over a garden tea table or the Madonna posing with her children. It is a picture out of a different world—a world stripped of beauty and pleasure and culture, the world of Forster’s “panic and emptiness,” the world after the great cat has pounced. “I really pity people who are not artists most of all, for they have no refuge from the world,” Vanessa wrote in 1939 to a friend that Julian had made in China. “I often wonder how life would be tolerable if one could not get detached from it, as even artists without much talent can, as long as they are sincere.” In Angelica’s ugly picture, Vanessa is caught in a moment of engagement with the intolerable.

  In “A Sketch of the Past” Virginia describes “a certain manner” that she and Vanessa were indelibly taught to assume when people came to tea at Hyde Park Gate: “We both learnt the rules of the game of Victorian society so thoroughly that we have never forgotten them,” she wrote in 1940.

  We still play the game. It is useful. It has also its beauty, for it is founded upon restraint, sympathy, unselfishness—all civilized qualities. It is helpful in making something seemly out of raw odds and ends . . . But the Victorian manner is perhaps—I’m not sure—a disadvantage in writing. When I read my old Literary Supplement articles, I lay the blame for their suavity, their politeness, their sidelong approach, to my tea-table training. I see myself, not reviewing a book, but handing plates of buns to shy young men and asking them: do they take cream and sugar? On the other hand, the surface manner allows one, as I have found, to slip in things that would be inaudible if one marched straight up and spoke out loud.

  Angelica has marched straight up and spoken out loud. She has cut her family down to size. She has shown up the civilized, oblique Bloomsbury manner for the hollow thing she believes it to be. She is a kind of counter-Cassandra—she looks back and sees nothing but darkness. Quentin’s quarrel with Angelica over her book is more than a sibling’s tiff about whose story is right. It is a disagreement about how stories of lives should be told. “To some extent the difference between us is the difference between one who plods and one who flies,” Quentin writes with characteristic sidelongness in his review of Deceived with Kindness, as he crushingly subjects his sister’s flights of accusing generalization to his own tolerant specificity. The struggle between the obedient, legitimate son of Bloomsbury and its disobliging, illegitimate daughter is an uneven one, and Quentin will prevail. The achievement of his biography, his wise and liberal management of the family papers, and the existence of Charleston (in whose restoration Angelica took an active hand, such is the messiness of life: in a novel, she would never have looked at the place again) ensure the preservation of the Bloomsbury legend in its seductive fauve colors. But Angelica’s cry, her hurt child’s protest, her disappointed woman’s bitterness will leave their trace, like a stain that won’t come out of a treasured Persian carpet and eventually becomes part of its beauty.

  THE WOMAN WHO HATED WOMEN

  1986

  The world of Edith Wharton’s novels—sometimes erroneously thought to be the actual world of late-nineteenth-century New York—is a dark, nightmarish place peopled by weak, desperate men and destructive, pathetic, narcissistic women. To read the four novels in this volume* is to become impressed anew with Wharton’s powers as a satirist—you could almost say a black humorist—and to be struck, perhaps for the first time, by the cool modernism of her writing. She is not the wan, old-fashioned realist we have taken her to be; she works not in the delicate traceries of Mrs. Gaskell, but in the black, bold strokes of Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, Don DeLillo. Her books are pervaded by a deep pessimism and an equally profound misogyny.

  Wharton’s stately autobiography, A Backward Glance, written in 1934 when she was seventy-two, is a sort of tour de force of self-control: she tells us exactly what she wants to tell us in a tone that never falters, and she cuts exactly the figure she has chosen to cut. The little betrayals (of complacency, pomposity, self-congratulation) that leak out of so many autobiographies simply do not leak out of Wharton’s. It is a remarkable performance, and indeed, the august persona that Wharton created for herself is such a powerful one that her biographer R.W.B. Lewis simply transferred it to the pages of his own stately book; it is to Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s restlessly original psychoanalytic literary study, A Feast of Words, that we must go to get beneath the onyx surface formed by A Backward Glance and the Lewis biogra
phy, and receive a sense of the troubled human being from whom the literary artist derives.

  But if A Backward Glance yields no personal secrets, it does not disappoint the snooper after literary secrets. In at least two places, Wharton inadvertently lets the figure in the carpet of her fiction come briefly into view. The first of these rare glimmerings is afforded by a strange story that Wharton says she heard in her youth in Newport, Rhode Island, from “a thin young man with intelligent eyes” named Cecil Spring-Rice, who appeared at a yachting party, told this and another story, and was never seen by her again. Like an analytic patient prefacing an important self-revelation with the obligatory disclaimer “this isn’t very interesting,” Wharton writes, “I record our single encounter only because his delightful talk so illuminated an otherwise dull afternoon that I have never forgotten the meeting.” She then tells this story:

  A young physician who was also a student of chemistry, and a dabbler in strange experiments, employed a little orphan boy as assistant. One day he ordered the boy to watch over, and stir without stopping, a certain chemical mixture which was to serve for a very delicate experiment. At the appointed time the chemist came back, and found the mixture successfully blent—but beside it lay the little boy, dead of the poisonous fumes.

  The young man, who was very fond of his assistant, was horrified at his death, and in despair at having involuntarily caused it. He could not understand why the fumes should have proved fatal, and wishing to find out, in the interest of science, he performed an autopsy, and discovered that the boy’s heart had been transformed into a mysterious jewel, the like of which he had never seen before. The young man had a mistress whom he adored, and full of grief, yet excited by this strange discovery, he brought her the tragic jewel, which was very beautiful, and told her how it had been produced. The lady examined it, and agreed that it was beautiful. “But,” she added carelessly, “you must have noticed that I wear no ornaments but earrings. If you want me to wear this jewel, you must get me another one just like it.”

  With this story we leave the bland everyday world of the autobiography and plunge into the mysterious, symbolic universe of Edith Wharton’s fiction, where “strange experiments” (that is, deviations from the social norm) inexorably lead to tragedy, and where the callousness and heartlessness by which this universe is ruled is the callousness and heartlessness of women. There are no bad men in Wharton’s fiction. There are weak men and there are foolish men and there are vulgar New Rich men, but no man ever deliberately causes harm to another person; that role is exclusively reserved for women. From the “society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers” that Wharton grimly satirizes in The House of Mirth (1905) and holds accountable for the death at twenty-eight of its beautiful, luxury-loving, moneyless heroine, Lily Bart (“A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys,” Wharton writes in A Backward Glance), she selects a woman, Bertha Dorset, to be the instrument of Lily’s ruin.

  Bertha is the personification of female treachery and malevolence and, incidentally, sexual voraciousness; she has no private character. When we meet her in the early pages of the novel, making a nuisance of herself on a train, she is rendered with the pouncing strokes of a Pascin drawing: “She was smaller and thinner than Lily Bart, with a restless pliability of pose, as if she could have been crumpled up and run through a ring, like the sinuous draperies she affected. Her small pale face seemed the mere setting of a pair of dark exaggerated eyes, of which the visionary gaze contrasted curiously with her self-assertive tone and gestures; so that, as one of her friends observed, she was like a disembodied spirit who took up a great deal of room.”

  If the spooky Bertha—whose first malign act is to queer Lily’s chances for marriage to the boring, priggish but extremely rich Percy Gryce—has the one-dimensionality of evil characters in fairy stories, dreams, and modernist satires, the tragic Lily is similarly “unreal” in her preternatural beauty and passivity. She is the fairy-tale heroine patiently waiting to be rescued, but help never comes. The House of Mirth is Wharton’s bitterly ironic retelling of the Cinderella story, in which the fairy godmother is a dour and stingy woman named Mrs. Peniston, the aunt who grudgingly doles out Lily’s clothes allowance to her and ultimately betrays her; the prince is a plump, “shoppy” Jew named Simon Rosedale, to whom Lily is finally reduced but who will marry her only on the condition that she do something dishonorable; and Lily herself is a sad little party girl whose vanity, craving for luxury, and pathological fear of what she calls “dinginess” make her vulnerable to the machinations of Bertha.

  Cynthia Wolff, in her extraordinary analysis of Ethan Frome, sees Ethan as an embodiment of the death instinct, and this reading is germane to Lily Bart as well. Lily’s death by an overdose of sleeping potion is a logical extension of her life, of the Sleeping Beauty existence from which she is never roused. Throughout the book, Wharton has planted—like small hidden road signs to the nirvana that is Lily’s destination—descriptions of the luxurious, soft, dimly lit guest bedrooms through which Lily passes on her journey. The first of this series of wombs is contrasted to the harsh, rough world outside:

  As she entered her bedroom, with its softly-shaded lights, her lace dressing-gown lying across the silken bedspread, her little embroidered slippers before the fire, a vase of carnations filling the air with perfume, and the last novels and magazines lying uncut on a table beside the reading-lamp, she had a vision of Miss Farish’s cramped flat, with its cheap conveniences and hideous wall-papers. No; she was not made for mean and shabby surroundings.

  Gerty Farish represents the alternative to Lily’s futile, parasitic existence in fashionable society—she is a plain young woman who lives in a small flat on very little money and works with the poor—but she actually is no alternative at all, for according to the novel’s strict archetypal code, the plain and the beautiful simply belong to different universes. When Gerty is held up to Lily as an exemplar of the independence that Lily has claimed to be impossible for money-less young women like herself, Lily cruelly points out, “But I said marriageable.”

  “Being a very normal person, she preferred men to women, and often terrified the latter with a cold stare,” Mrs. Gordon Bell, a friend of Wharton’s, recalls in Percy Lubbock’s waspish memoir, Portrait of Edith Wharton, adding, “Many women who only knew her slightly have said to me, ‘She looks at me as if I were a worm.’ ” With Undine Spragg, the antiheroine of The Custom of the Country (1913), Wharton takes her cold dislike of women to a height of venomousness previously unknown in American letters, and probably never surpassed. Undine’s face is lovely, but her soul is as dingy as Gerty Farish’s flat. Ralph Marvell, one of her unfortunate husbands, reflects on “the bareness of the small half-lit place in which his wife’s spirit fluttered.”

  Undine is one of the Invaders, as Wharton calls the people with new money who are taking over New York from the gentle, enervated old aristocracy. Her simple, indulgent father, Abner Spragg, comes to New York from a town called Apex with Mrs. Spragg and Undine and sets up residence at the Stentorian Hotel, on the West Side, to launch Undine in society. Underneath Undine’s small-town naïveté and her vulgarisms and gaucheness lies a vast destructive energy that propels her toward her improbable social goals. In turn, she marries Marvell, a member of the Old New York aristocracy; Raymond de Chelles, a French aristocrat; and, finally, Elmer Moffat, a raucous fellow-Invader from Undine’s hometown who has become so rich and powerful that he has taken to collecting art.

  As the nepenthean guest bedrooms of The House of Mirth set that novel’s tone of deadly languor, so does a series of airless, hideously ugly, and decreasingly luxurious American hotels to which the elder Spraggs are reduced by Undine’s voracious demands for money provide The Custom of the Country with its most mordant trope of alienation. We meet the family in the “sodden splendour” of the Stentorian breakfast room, a

  sumptuous stuffy room, where coffee-fumes hung perpetually unde
r the emblazoned ceiling and the spongy carpet might have absorbed a year’s crumbs without a sweeping. About them sat other pallid families, richly dressed, and silently eating their way through a bill-of-fare which seemed to have ransacked the globe for gastronomic incompatibilities; and in the middle of the room a knot of equally pallid waiters, engaged in languid conversation, turned their backs by common consent on the persons they were supposed to serve.

  At the end, the Spraggs are in the Malibran, “a tall narrow structure resembling a grain-elevator divided into cells, where linoleum and lincrusta simulated the stucco and marble of the Stentorian, and fagged business men and their families consumed the watery stews dispensed by ‘coloured help’ in the grey twilight of a basement dining-room.”

  Undine is Becky Sharp stripped of all charm, spirit, and warmth, the adventuress pared down to her pathology, but a pathology that is invested with a kind of magical malignancy. Undine’s name, as Mrs. Spragg earnestly informs Ralph during his courtship of her daughter, comes from “a hair-waver father put on the market the week she was born . . . It’s from undoolay, you know, the French for crimping.” But Undine is also the name of a legendary water sprite, and by presenting her tacky protagonist as a creature of the deeps—a cold, bloodless being, a Lorelei luring men to their deaths—Wharton seeks to make it credible that any man of substance would look at her twice. The attempt is not wholly successful.

  Like George Eliot’s Rosamund Vincy, Undine inspires in her creator a kind of loathing that makes the reader nervous even as it powerfully works on him; like Eliot’s account of Lydgate’s sufferings at the hands of Rosamund in Middlemarch, Wharton’s account of Marvell’s sufferings at the hands of Undine has less the evenhandedness of omniscient authorship than it has the partisanship of love—love for the castrated male. Unlike Eliot, however, Wharton offers no alternative; no wonderful woman—no Dorothea Brooke—appears in The Custom of the Country or in any other Wharton work. Ellen Olenska, the heroine of The Age of Innocence (1920), is supposed to be a wonderful woman, but in fact she is a fantasy figure—an idea, a spirit as disembodied as Bertha Dorset. She seems to be drawn from Anna Karenina, but she has none of Anna’s elating and heartrending actuality. Throughout the novel Ellen remains frozen into a kind of simulacrum of the vision of the charming and radiant Anna that Vronsky first fell in love with; the character never develops beyond that vision. Ellen’s fan of eagle feathers, her monkey-fur muff, the artistic atmosphere of her house, her exotic flowers and unconventional clothes are the stuff of which she is made; she is almost pure sign.