Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

  P.M.

  To give 2 points of view at once; authority and irresponsibility. Authority prancing through the streets sending uneasiness to Gerard Street.

  (diversion upon the respectable worldliness – from point of view of Scallywag who is looking at books.)

  P.M. drives on.

  Digression on china, French shops, Restaurants.

  Freedom-irresponsibility

  Contrast between thought and action

  The guards changing

  P.M. reaches Westminster

  (he has a card for the party)

  The crowd assembled.†

  The Scallywag who is looking at books will become Clarissa, pausing to look into Hatchards’ window in Piccadilly, but the Scallywag himself will disappear; if there are traces of him in Peter Walsh and Sally Seton, they have both compromised too well with worldliness and authority to be thought of as threatening – he a colonial administrator, with a bad reputation where women are concerned, but still dining respectably in a Bloomsbury hotel; she the mother of five boys at Eton.

  Two days after these notes were written, something happened which set Virginia’s imagination working in an entirely new direction. She received the news of the death of an old family friend and society hostess, Mrs Kitty Maxse, a one-time protégée of Virginia’s mother, regarded in the family as ‘the paragon for wit, grace, charm and distinction’.* Virginia herself had disliked her, however, and thought her a snob. Mrs Maxse had been one of those who had tried to embark Virginia and her sister Vanessa, when they were girls, on a conventional social career, from which both had fled with great determination.

  Her death was unexpected; she was only fifty-five, and had fallen down a flight of stairs. The possibility of suicide occurred at once to Virginia, although the idea seems to relate to her own cast of mind rather than to the facts of the matter. Mrs Maxse had merely fainted, slipped and been exceedingly unfortunate. But suicide was something Virginia thought about more than most. She had attempted it herself in 1913; and she kept the idea stored in her mind, to be taken out and examined from time to time, throughout her life.

  She and Mrs Maxse had not met since 1908, and Virginia noted but did not attend the memorial service on 11 October. Her detested stepbrother George Duckworth was there, as an habitué of the dead woman’s social world (he too makes an appearance, complete with sexual aggression, as Hugh Whitbread, in Mrs Dalloway). Three days later, Virginia’s diary entry for 14 October shows her planning ‘a study of insanity & suicide: the world seen by the sane & the insane side by side – something like that’. The same page of the diary introduces Septimus Smith for the first time: ‘is that a good name?’ she asked herself.

  With the entry of Septimus Smith the early plans to make the Prime Minister a major character, rather than the mere dummy he becomes in the final version, were jettisoned. Just possibly Leonard’s failure to be elected to Parliament in mid November tilted the book further away from politics; plus the substitution of first Bonar Law and then Baldwin for Lloyd George as Prime Minister. All the same, Virginia was still expressing her intention of criticizing the social system some months later. A diary entry for 19 June 1923 complains of ‘almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & show it at work, at its most intense.’

  There are further notes for ‘A possible revision of this book’:

  Suppose it to be connected in this way. Sanity and insanity.

  Mrs D. is seeing the truth. Septimus seeing the insane truth.

  The book is to have the intensity of a play; only in narrative.

  Some revisions therefore needed.

  At any rate, very careful composition.

  The contrast must be arranged.

  Therefore, how much detail and digression?

  The pace to be given by a gradual increase of S.’s insanity on one

  side, by the approach of the party on the other.

  The design is extremely complicated.

  The balance must be very finely considered.

  All to take place in one day?

  There must be excitement to draw one on.

  Also human.

  The question is whether the inside of the mind in both Mrs D. and SS can be made luminous – that is to say the stuff of the book -Lights on it coming from external sources.*

  These and other exploratory ideas and suggestions to herself (such as ‘I want to think out Mrs Dalloway. I want to foresee this book better than the others, & get the utmost out of it’ on 29 October 1922) may seem at odds with her own statement, made in the introduction to the American edition of Mrs Dalloway in 1928, that she had written the book ‘as the oyster starts or the snail to secrete a house for itself… without any conscious direction’. But it is easy for an author to forget the precise history of a composition, and with hindsight the structure of a book can come to seem inevitable. The working notes may well have slipped from her mind, or may have seemed themselves no other than the secretions of her imagination.

  In the middle of December, Virginia met for the first time the ‘lovely gifted aristocratic’ Vita Sackville West, ‘florid, moustached, parakeet coloured… She is a grenadier; hard; handsome, manly’, and she made Virginia feel ‘virgin, shy & schoolgirlish’ {Diary, December 1922). Almost at once Virginia heard of Vita’s reputation for Sapphism, her word for lesbian love; which made her no less fascinating. During the course of the next two years the two women fell in love, though their physical affair did not begin until 1925. Vita is the only person known to have stirred Virginia to erotic feeling; it is a feeling that is partly given to Clarissa Dalloway in her reminiscences of her lovely, spontaneous girlhood friend Sally Seton. Clarissa states that she was more in love with Sally than with any man; Sally’s mere presence under the same roof inspired Clarissa to rapture (‘“if it were now to die ‘twere now to be most happy” she thought’); Sally had taken her out in the moonlight and kissed her on the lips, giving her the ‘most exquisite moment of her whole life’. All this Clarissa recalled exactly when both women were middle aged, married and mothers.

  Virginia Woolf wrote this four years before Radclyffe Hall published her explicitly lesbian and, as it turned out, scandalous novel, The Well ofLoneliness, which Woolf was to defend. Clarissa’s musings may seem mild, but they are unequivocal, as she thinks how she ‘could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman’, and

  did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores!

  This is a remarkable passage, whether it alludes to a sexual experience or is no more than an image. It is also linked by its context to Clarissa’s melancholy feelings about her celibate state, for it occurs as she is going to the single bed in which her husband insists she sleeps, undisturbed (and from which she hears him drop his hot-water bottle and swear in another room); it is associated with the Virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet’, and her sense that she had failed as a wife through her coldness.

  Other men complain of her frigidity in the course of the book -her old admirer, Peter Walsh, who calls her icicle-cold, and the artist Sir Harry, who comes to her party and regrets her damnable over-refinement – but these passages in which Clarissa deplores her ethereal relations with her husband and nun-like, chaste existence are hard to read without reference to the known conditions of Virginia’s and Leonard’s marriage, which had the additional sorrow of childlessness (Clarissa is allowed one daughter, Elizabeth, though she is a markedly remote young woman). It was by Leonard’s decree that Virginia had no children; he sought the backing of the medical prof
ession, but only some doctors agreed with him, others advising quite the opposite. It was also Leonard’s decision that there should be no sex, a resolve which may relate to his personal anxieties and repugnances as well as to his wish to care for his wife. Before his marriage, when he was a colonial administrator in Ceylon, Leonard had complained to his best friend Lytton Strachey that ‘Most women naked… are extraordinarily ugly.’* When Lytton embarked on a postal campaign to persuade Leonard that he should marry Virginia – a campaign interspersed with flirtatious remarks of his own to Leonard (‘Isn’t it odd that I’ve never really been in love with you?’) and, still more extraordinarily, an account of his own proposal to Virginia, which she accepted and he then hastily withdrew – Leonard responded with some theoretical initial enthusiasm, but it did not last and he appeared to have ended the subject by declaring in September 1909, Of course I know that the one thing to do would be to marry Virginia’ but that ‘the ghastly complications of virginity and marriage altogether appal me’. He predicted he would instead marry ‘at forty a widow or ex-prostitute’. These are a young man’s remarks to his Cambridge friend, of course; Leonard returned to England, things changed, he met Virginia (whom he scarcely knew except through Lytton’s praises), did indeed fall in love with her, and soon persuaded her to marry him. They were, in some senses, an ideally happy couple, except sexually, and except for her mental instability, which manifested itself dramatically within months of the wedding. Yet it is odd that Leonard never referred to Lytton’s letters when he came to write his autobiography. Some scholars, notably Roger Poole in his The Unknown Virginia Woolf, have argued that the experience of marriage was not wholly benign for Virginia, and that she suffered from the sense that Leonard controlled her too fiercely.

  In her first diary entry for 1923 she has an outburst which bears on all this:

  I am in one of my moods, as the nurses used to call it, today. And what is it & why? A desire for children, I suppose… Let me have one confessional where I need not boast. Years & years ago, after the Lytton affair, I said to myself… never pretend that the things you haven’t got are not worth having; good advice I think. At least it often comes back to me. Never pretend that children, for instance, can be replaced by other things.

  And she goes on to describe Leonard telephoning her at the Bells’ London house to express his displeasure at her for staying up too late:

  Late again. Very foolish. Your heart bad – & so my self reliance being sapped, I had no courage to venture against his will. Then I react. Of course its a difficult question. For undoubtedly I get headaches or the jump in my heart; & then this spoils his pleasure, & if one lives with a person, has one the right – So it goes on. (Diary, January 1923; my italics)

  She acknowledged her reliance on him, her love and his perpetual goodness, but she was sometimes undoubtedly restless under his control, and resistant. In March she regretted his attitude to ‘the social question’, because he wanted to refuse invitations, whereas she loved ‘the chatter and excitement of other peoples houses’. Again, in June, she complained about being ‘imprisoned’ in the suburbs by Leonard, ‘too much of a Puritan, of a disciplinarian’.

  Leonard’s failure to arouse her sexual nature, followed by his complete denial of it, and his refusal to let her have children, were painful and troubling. So were the restraints he put on her social life. As she moved into her forties, she realized that she was losing the possibility of a child; on the other hand, she was beginning to be famous, and courted by hostesses; the world was at her feet, and here again Leonard wanted to spoil things. When Lytton Strachey read Mrs Dalloway he saw a discordancy in it, partly caused, he said, by the fact that Clarissa is only partly the character Virginia intended: ‘I alternately laugh at her & cover her, very remarkably, with myself (Diary, June 1925) is her report of his comment. It is an acute one, for the book is indeed disturbingly personal, the fiction in which she uncovers some of her own deepest wounds and allows her rage to speak.

  In January 1923 she gave the manuscript a new name, The Hours. She worked at it only intermittently, for she was writing a volume of critical essays, The Common Reader, at the same time; and in the spring she and Leonard went to Spain for a month’s holiday. In June she noted that ‘the mad part tries me so much, makes my mind squint so badly that I can hardly face spending the next weeks at it’. It is not surprising that she found difficulty with this, since Septimus’s experience of madness, through the effect of shell-shock, bears a close resemblance to what we know of Virginia’s symptoms in her times of breakdown: hearing voices, self-disgust, loathing for the human race, terror of the way doctors forced their will on her. But she got through this triumphantly. Then, ‘The design is so queer & so masterful. I’m always having to wrench my substance to fit it. The design is certainly original, & interests me hugely. I should like to write away & away at it, very quick and fierce. Needless to say, I cant. In three weeks from today I shall be dried up.’ In August she wrote in her diary of digging out ‘beautiful caves behind my characters’, and in September she planned to study Lydia Lopokova, the ballerina who was to marry Maynard Keynes, as a ‘type’ for Lucrezia. In October she was ‘in the thick of the mad scene in Regent’s Park… clinging as tight to fact as I can’. She worried about Clarissa, ‘too stiff, too glittering & tinsely’, but also ‘I feel I can use up everything I’ve ever thought’.

  The section on the doctors was written by the following spring (1924), when the Woolfs moved from Richmond to Tavistock Square, to Virginia’s great pleasure. In May she noted in her diary:

  London is enchanting. I step out upon a tawny coloured magic carpet, it seems, & get carried into beauty without raising a finger. The nights are amazing, with all the white porticoes & broad silent avenues. And people pop in & out, lightly, divertingly like rabbits; & I look down Southampton Row, wet as a seal’s back or red & yellow with sunshine, & watch the omnibus going & coming, & hear the old crazy organs. One of these days I will write about London, & how it takes up the private life & carries it on, without any effort. Faces passing lift up my mind; prevent it from settling, as it does in the stillness at Rodmell.

  But my mind is full of The Hours.

  In July she made her first visit to Long Barn with Vita (‘as a body hers is perfection’); in August she was depressed, fearing the book was ‘sheer weak dribble’. Then she was writing the death of Septimus, and thinking of the end, the grand party, and Peter Walsh eating his dinner: ‘I like going from one lighted room to another, such is my brain to me.’ On 17 October Mrs Dalloway was finished.

  She started revising at once, and in December

  I am now galloping over Mrs Dalloway, re-typing it entirely from the start, which is more or less what I did with the V.O. [The Voyage Out] a good method, I believe, as thus one works with a wet brush over the whole, & joins parts separately composed and gone dry. Really & honestly I think it the most satisfactory of my novels (but have not read it coldbloodedly yet). The reviewers will say that it is disjointed because of the mad scenes not connecting with the Dalloway scenes. And I suppose there is some superficial glittery writing. But is it ‘unreal’? Is it mere accomplishment? I think not. And as I think I said before, it seems to leave me plunged deep in the richest strata of my mind.

  Mrs Dalloway was published on 14 May 1925. Technically and stylistically, it is among the most brilliant of Virginia’s works. It has its thinnesses and weaknesses, one of which is the characterization of Elizabeth Dalloway’s tutor, Miss Kilman, the unhappy young woman scholar detested by Clarissa and also apparently by her creator, who loads her with every vice, from being the possessor of an ugly mackintosh to greed at the tea-table of the Army and Navy Stores. Where Miss Kilman was drawn from, and why she gets this vicious treatment, remains mysterious, an uncomfortable blot on the book, and quite inessential to either of its two main themes.

  One of these themes is that of London itself, Westminster, St James’s, Bond Street, Piccadilly, Bloomsbury, Regent�
��s Park, Tottenham Court Road, Fleet Street and the Strand: you can follow quite exactly the routes taken by Clarissa, Peter, Richard and Elizabeth, on foot or by bus. Virginia Woolf’s enjoyment of the city and its pleasures breathes from the pages of the novel: its solid wealth, its motor cars and discreetly luxurious shops selling flowers and jewels to the rich; its stolid royal family, served by self-important courtiers; its luncheons, at which letters to The Times are drafted by majestic people of power, position and income; all buttressed by the Empire and mercantile Manchester. This London is full of past and also future, when Bond Street will be ‘a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth’. Its rich share with its poor the parks, notably Regent’s Park, which provides the setting for the centre of the book; rich and poor also share the enjoyable novelty of an advertising slogan trailed across the sky by an aeroplane. The rich may even venture on to an omnibus to experience one of the pleasures of the poor, as Elizabeth Dalloway does. Servants, however, are likely to take their pleasure vicariously. Mrs Dalloway’s maid Lucy is romantically thrilled by the loveliness of her mistress, and by the sight of Miss Elizabeth in her pink dress and the necklace Mr Dalloway has given her; Lucy couldn’t take her eyes off her’. As for the very poor, like the street singer outside Marylebone station, she is entirely depersonalized; she has her dignity, but it is the dignity of a tree stump rather than a human being.

  Similarly, the old nurse knitting on a bench in Regent’s Park next to the sleeping Peter Walsh is transformed into something rich and strange:

  In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveller, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of great hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride…