The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  Strachey, of course, is best known for having challenged the staid, fact-gathering, and incorrigibly sentimental tradition of historical biography with his irreverent and psychologically informed approach to hallowed public figures. Eminent Victorians, published in 1918, was something of a literary bombshell, as much a critique of the hypocritical and sanctimonious mores of the Victorian age as it was an exploration of four individual lives. Strachey’s ironic tone and ambivalent stance toward his subjects, who included Cardinal Manning and Florence Nightingale, was a radical departure from the idealizing and airbrushing principles that held sway until he came along. The critic Cyril Connolly described Eminent Victorians as “a revolutionary textbook on bourgeois society.” And one contemporary reader, who appreciated Strachey’s refusal to be awed by the high-minded in high places, observed, “You can feel reading the book that he is pleased that Miss Nightingale grew fat and that her brain softened.” Strachey went on to refine his skills with his biography of Queen Victoria, which came out three years later and gave a complex and moving portrait of a woman who had been cloaked under the vestments of monarchy and the funereal garb of her widowhood.

  Queen Victoria is dedicated to Virginia Woolf, one of Strachey’s great chums and the only woman he ever proposed marriage to; the offer was rescinded, to the relief of both of them, within twenty-four hours. (“I was in terror,” Lytton wrote to Leonard Woolf, “lest she would kiss me.”) A large part of why I found solace in reading about his life was Strachey’s membership in that fabled, ceaselessly self-evaluating, and tirelessly documented circle of chatterboxes known as Bloomsbury.

  Bloomsbury has been described as having the self-important air of an exclusive club; the group’s many critics, then as now, found it easy to write them off, as Leon Edel notes, as “a parcel of snobs, eccentric, insolent, arrogant, egotistical, preoccupied with neurotic personal relations.” Still, indubitably clannish as they were, the price of admission to what Edel calls the “House of Lions” had nothing to do with Edwardian standards of lineage or class (although many of the members leaned on independent incomes) and everything to do with a democratic principle of competitively sharpened wits. The attitude of sexual tolerance (according to legend, Strachey was the first mortal to utter aloud the word “semen” in mixed company) only added to the fun; there were several “open marriages,” and bisexuality seems to have been a Bloomsbury specialty. “What was so new and exhilarating to me,” Leonard Woolf observed after spending one evening in their company, “was the sense of intimacy and complete freedom of thought and speech … above all including women.”

  All of us long to be at home in the world, to find our singular passions reflected in a larger pond than the selves we swim in. Hell may be other people, as Sartre bluntly asserted in No Exit, but mired in my solitary darkness, I took great comfort in the ideal of a literary community—a fellowship of like-minded neurasthenic souls—that Bloomsbury represented. Having found myself not up to the bustle of life, I clung to the refuge of reading about people—writers, critics, painters, economists, philosophers, and historians—who took the athletics of reading and thinking as seriously as living.

  My original affection for Bloomsbury and its intricate family gossip has never faded. I believe that I have read every second- and third-generation account that has been published about them—including Angelica Garnett’s indicting memoir, Deceived with Kindness. (Garnett, the daughter of Vanessa Bell and the painter Duncan Grant, was led to believe that her father was Clive Bell and eventually married David Garnett, a cousin of Strachey’s who had once been Grant’s lover.) My first publisher, William Jovanovich, warned me years ago that if I wrote the biography of Dora Carrington—who improbably fell in love with Lytton Strachey and set up house with him—I was so set on writing, I would be accused, in his picturesque phrase, of “scraping the bottom of the Bloomsbury barrel.” Although a biography of Carrington eventually did appear, I have little doubt that he was right. (In tongue-in-cheek tribute to the avalanche of books that has come out of the group, Malcolm Bradbury called one of his essay collections No, Not Bloomsbury.)

  Did the Bloomsbury in my mind ever really exist? The Algonquin Round Table? The expatriate Paris of the 1920s? Was the post–World War II Greenwich Village of Anatole Broyard’s memoir Kafka Was the Rage really as companionable as he would have us think? Or are all these literary Camelots of one kind or another nothing but wishful havens in a heartless world? Such cozy visions of companionship exist in part because we are in dire need of them. Beyond that, I’m not sure it matters how much of these legendary communities is real and how much is myth, so long as they help moor us to our vastly imperfect lives by allowing us a grown-up fantasy of the perfect familial embrace.

  THE LOOSE, DRIFTING MATERIAL OF LIFE

  (VIRGINIA WOOLF)

  1997

  How in the world, you may find yourself thinking, can the delicate but overarticulated psyche of Virginia Woolf withstand yet another exhumation? Can there possibly be any gold left to extract from the overmined precincts of Bloomsbury, where Virginia and Vanessa and Leonard and Clive and Duncan and Morgan and Maynard and Lytton moved about with an avid sense of post-Victorian newness, talking and writing to beat the band? It is an oft-told story, gripping in its details: the beautiful but remote mother who died when Virginia was thirteen; the father grunting away at his literary labors, inconsolable in his grief; the sexual advances of her half brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth; the early breakdowns; the rivalry with her sister, Vanessa; the marriage to the “penniless Jew” Leonard; the intense friendships with other women, including lesbian affairs with Vita Sackville-West and Ethel Smyth; and then her suicide in 1941, at the age of fifty-nine.

  As Hermione Lee, a professor of English literature at the University of Liverpool and the author of a biography of Willa Cather, notes, Virginia Woolf’s “status has grown beyond anything that even she, with her strong sense of her own achievements, might have imagined.” The greater a writer’s status, of course, the more likely he or she will be appropriated by others: Given the sheer volume of material that’s been produced about Woolf—all those books, articles, and scholarly papers, not to mention memoirs, letters, diaries, and psychoanalytic readings—is there anything vital left to say? This question is raised by Lee herself (“periodic attacks of archive-faintness overcame me”) and must inevitably occur to even the most ardent of Bloomsbury/Woolf fans when faced with this rather hefty volume. One hesitates to commit oneself, wondering whether the time put in will have been worth it at the end—a bit ashamed of this cost-accounting approach but wary nonetheless.

  Virginia Woolf had very mixed feelings about biography, or “life-writing,” as she called it. On the one hand she was an enthusiast. “As everybody knows,” she wrote in her essay on Christina Rossetti, “the fascination of reading biographies is irresistible.” But, as Lee points out in the opening chapter of her remarkable new book, Woolf also declared biography to be “a bastard, an impure art” and claimed that the very idea was “poppycock.” Objecting to “the draperies and decencies” of the Victorian approach, she still had qualms about “the new biography” as practiced by her good friend Lytton Strachey. She argued within her own work “about the rival merits of archival and imaginative research” and eventually wrote fictional biographies (Orlando, Flush) as well as a real one (Roger Fry). Throughout her life Woolf pondered the silence of her own sex when it came to autobiography; always fascinated by “the gap between the outer self (‘the fictitious V.W. whom I carry like a mask about the world’) and the secret self,” she intended to write her own life from her diaries. Still, with “her perpetual fear of egotistical self-exposure” (an inhibition that began in the merciless teasing of her childhood and ripened in the preening atmosphere of Bloomsbury’s Memoir Club), it is unlikely she would have risked being truly forthcoming when being “fearfully brilliant” would do.

  Lee documents the evolving perception of her subject from “the delicate l
ady authoress of a few experimental novels and sketches, some essays, and a ‘writer’s’ diary, to one of the most professional, perfectionist, energetic, courageous, and committed writers in the language.” She does this without recourse to the politicized agendas of the academy or special pleading (all of Woolf’s flaws are on display here). This account sets itself above the fray, the better to home in on the glittery and elusive creature at its center—the prize catch in what one critic has described as the Bloomsbury pond.

  From its very first page Lee’s book is informed by current thinking on how to approach the writing of someone’s life: “There is no such thing as an objective biography, particularly not in this case. Positions have been taken, myths have been made.” But it is also infused with a very personal passion for her subject, which enables the author to cut crisply through the labyrinth of theories that have sprung up: there is “no way of knowing,” she asserts, whether the teenage Virginia Stephen was really violated, “forced to have oral sex”—or, indeed, any kind of sex. What we get instead of reductionist speculation—Virginia Woolf as incest survivor or proto-feminist or trailblazing postmodernist—is a vivid picture of an age in flux and the pressures, internal as well as external, that it brought to bear upon one particularly sensitive female.

  Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 into an Edwardian world of water closets and silver salvers filled with visiting cards, a world without electric lighting. During her childhood there were still some households that kept carriages “with a coachman and footman who wore powdered wigs, and yellow plush knee breeches and silk stockings”; when she and her half sister, Stella, took a walk in Kensington Gardens, they sometimes bumped into Henry James. As late as 1904, when a twenty-two-year-old Virginia was living with her three siblings in what her parents’ generation regarded as a bohemian, if not déclassé, setup at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury (“Henry James was particularly aghast”), bathroom references were still cause for embarrassment. In 1917, observing the freedom in matters of attire and sexual preference enjoyed by her new women friends, like Katherine Mansfield and Dora Carrington, she could note, “It seems to me quite impossible to wear trousers.” In 1927 a cheroot-smoking Virginia Woolf would shingle her hair, and in the summer of 1934 she switched from an old-fashioned nib to a fountain pen. In 1939, light-years away from her cloistered beginnings, she met Freud, who presented her with a narcissus.

  Lee renders this world, in which change was both slow in coming and shocking in its effect, with technically inventive moments, such as the one early in the book in which she recounts a visit the four young orphaned Stephens paid to their beloved childhood summer house, and moves brilliantly from a freeze-framed scene to conjuring up a re-created moment in the past, using To the Lighthouse as a referent: “Like Lily Briscoe conjuring up Mrs. Ramsay, we can superimpose, on to the image of the four young Stephens standing outside the hedge in the dusk, the image of summers of twenty years before. We can take the ghosts, turning them back into children, through the escallonia hedge … and back into the 1880s. The sun comes out, the house and garden are full of children and adults in Victorian clothes—family, visitors—walking and playing cricket and picking flowers and talking and reading. Julia Stephen is sitting there, casting her shadow on the step.” Lee skillfully links the gradual rescripting of the “old laws” with the developments in Virginia Woolf’s sense of herself and her writing, enabling us to see how the modernist refashioning of culture influenced her creative vision and helped her begin to untangle the problem of “how to present ‘intellectual argument in the form of art.’”

  This biographer also makes judicious use of psychological conjecture; by keeping a careful distance from jargon-ridden speculations (“But do we need … to put Virginia Woolf on the couch and make more sense of her than she can make of herself?”) and by maintaining a certain modesty before the irreducible nature of her subject, Lee comes across as immensely insightful without appearing to have all the answers at hand. Of Woolf’s parents, for instance, she remarks, “They both died before she had begun to prove herself as a writer, but it is probable that her writer’s life was driven by the desire to say ‘look at me!’ to those two exceptional and critical parents.”

  Lee is good, as well, on the crucial role of Leonard—this man who seemed “so foreign” to his wife-to-be even as she is only months away from marrying him and who eventually became her truest companion. In the legend that has grown up around Virginia Woolf, Leonard features as a grim head nurse of a husband, ceaselessly gauging his wife’s symptoms and doling out the amount of time she may spend chatting with visitors. Lee does not deny this side of him, conceding that Leonard’s vigilant supervision of his wife’s social life “certainly turned him, over the years, into more of a guardian than a lover,” but he takes on fuller form here than he has elsewhere, exhibiting ambitions and judgments of his own—not only in the arena of politics, where Virginia favored pacifism in the face of the mounting threat from Hitler and Leonard favored going to war, but also when it came to people and literature. (Leonard was bored by much of Bloomsbury’s partying; found Ethel Smyth, the eccentric seventy-two-year-old composer with whom his forty-eight-year-old wife fell briefly in love, “appalling”; and thought Three Guineas his wife’s worst book.) And although it has become de rigueur to treat the Woolfs’ marriage as a sexless union of highbrows, the one sober and the other mad, this is the first biography I have read that succeeds, through a subtle shift in emphasis, in conveying the profoundly intimate quality of their relationship—the way Virginia felt about Leonard’s presence of an evening when they both read quietly, “L in his stall, I in mine.”

  Lee subverts the established view still further by suggesting that at least in the beginning, as evidenced by the playful use of pet names (Virginia was often “Mandril” and Leonard “Mongoose”) and general indulgence in what Virginia called “private fun,” the Woolfs’ marriage had a cuddly, even frisky aspect—“an erotic secret life.” (Another recent biography, Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf by Panthea Reid, while not nearly as strong as Lee’s, makes fascinating use of documents that are either unfamiliar or heretofore unpublished. So we fall upon a startlingly sexy note written by Virginia to Leonard a year and a half after their marriage, in which the Mandril “wishes me to inform you delicately that her flanks and rump are now in finest plumage, and invites you to an exhibition.” Virginia when she sizzles sounds very hot indeed!)

  Of the many original ideas that Lee takes up, the place of reading in Virginia Woolf’s life and the meaning of her madness are especially well developed. Although Woolf’s was too mocking a sensibility to give itself over to the Pateresque view of art as a form of religion, she clearly found solace—a way out from her overwhelming sense of futility, “the old treadmill feeling of going on and on and on, for no reason”—in the ordering properties of reading and writing. Reading became for her, as Lee describes it, a means “of transcending the self.” (She wrote to Ethel Smyth, “Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.”) As for Woolf’s psychological frailty—“my own queer, difficult nervous system”—Hermione Lee makes a persuasive case for her underlying sanity and for the literary use to which she put the epiphanies revealed to her in her breakdowns. Notwithstanding her “blue devils,” which was her term for depression, and the agitations of her manic phases, she nurtured a hard-won affirmative instinct. She admitted to a “terror of real life” and a general thin-skinnedness—“Cut me anywhere, & I bleed too profusely”—and by her own recognition she descended from an overbred, attenuated line: “such cold fingers, so fastidious, so critical, such taste.” To which assessment she added: “My madness has saved me.”

  And perhaps, indeed, it did. As she aged, she seems never to have succumbed to middle-aged prejudices; she remained porous in a way creative people are often imagined to be but rarely are. Although it may seem odd to call someone who killed herself (she put a large stone in a pocket and walked into the O
use River) heroic, it is all the same the word that one most associates with Virginia Woolf after reading this biography. She ceaselessly challenged herself in her art, always giving “this loose, drifting material of life” her best imaginative capacities. Her courage in questioning the manifold smug assumptions of the patriarchal culture in which she lived—ranging from its educational system (she felt a particular disdain for masculine vanity as personified by Oxbridge dons and turned down several honorary degrees) to the way it waged war—is easy to overlook because of the subtlety and whimsy of her methods. But it is all the more striking when one considers that she might have comfortably inhabited the privileged niche she had within that culture (T. S. Eliot called it “a kind of hereditary position in English letters”) without rocking the boat.

  Hermione Lee has written a discerning and utterly absorbing account of the cost of female genius and the interplay of the forces that shape an individual life (as well as the perception of that life). Although her biography has not uncovered any startling new facts, Lee’s tone and level of interpretation are such that she has performed the impossible: she has rescued Virginia Woolf from her iconic standing and restored her to human dimensions. We come to see her as she really was, unabashedly snobbish (she found Joyce’s Ulysses “underbred, the work of a self-taught working man”) and unremittingly envious—she was always snapping at the heels of other people’s self-regard—yet also luminous and tender and generous, the person you would most like to see coming down the path.

  I wish that the extensive notes were less confusingly organized, and I would like to have heard a bit more, given the capaciousness of this work, about the fluctuations in Virginia Woolf’s reputation. Although she is today firmly ensconced in the canon, she would have been a dubious literary bet at any number of historical moments in the last half century. There were always those, like the critic Raymond Mortimer, who thought she had the “Midas touch” as a writer—“every word she uses is alive and pulling like a trout on a line”—but the Leavisite assault on Bloomsbury and its ethos began a period of diminishment as early as the 1930s. Queenie Leavis liked to refer to Virginia Woolf as “the clever daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen,” as if she were describing an unusually articulate debutante. And there is something about Woolf’s writing—its lack of rigid ego boundaries and blurring of subject-object distinctions as manifested by the fluid plotlines and evasion of authorial omniscience—that has consistently threatened a certain kind of male reader, from Erich Auerbach (who noted in Mimesis that she “does not seem to bear in mind that she is the author and hence ought to know how matters stand with her characters”) to John Bayley (whose censorious essay some years ago rapped Woolf on her knuckles for her competitiveness and lack of a “sense of moral order,” only to allow that “she might have grown up in her last years and moved us in the more considered ways that older writers do”).