The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

by Peter Dally

  Savage told Leonard that Virginia suffered from ‘neurasthenia, and not manic depressive insanity’, and that marriage and children would do her ‘a world of good’.38 What had happened to his professional consistency and integrity?

  The term neurasthenia was introduced by the American neurologist George Beard in 1869, and for a time it was used for all mental illness except insanity. It was seen as a disease of modern civilisation, respectable and lacking the stigma of madness. For some years neurasthenia was an immensely popular diagnosis but by 1912 medical belief in it as an entity was already fast waning, and today it is forgotten.

  Savage knew that Virginia had recurring periods of ‘depression and buoyancy’ and had been insane, yet he confidently said she suffered from neurasthenia. Had he diagnosed manic depression he would have been obliged to follow his own advice and warn Leonard of the dangers of marriage and the future. As it was he was able to maintain that marriage and children would do Virginia ‘a world of good’. Perhaps he eased his conscience by reflecting that neurasthenia was ‘the soil from which all mental illnesses spring’; but it must have been hard to reconcile his view that ‘marriage should never be recommended as a means of cure … or a relief for so-called neurasthenia’ with his advice to Leonard.39

  Did Savage deliberately mislead Leonard? Was he medically negligent? He would be judged so in today’s courts, but at the time he may simply have seen himself being economical with the truth. He liked the Stephen family and wanted to see his friend Leslie’s daughter fulfilled in marriage and motherhood. He considered she led an undesirable destabilising style of life, and he hoped marriage to a reliable man could be her salvation. His professionalism took second place to his emotions on this occasion and led him to lose his objectivity. It would have been better to have discussed the problem frankly and fully with Leonard. The facts would hardly have stopped Leonard from marrying and he would have responded by trusting Savage thereafter.

  Virginia at first was as optimistic about her future health as Savage: ‘I shall never be ill again because with Leonard I get no chance,’ she confided to Janet Case.40 She and Leonard were married on Saturday 10 August at St Pancras Register Office, while a thunderstorm raged prophetically overhead. They spent the weekend at Asham and several days at Holford in the Quantock Hills before embarking on a gruelling tour of Provence and Spain, and thence by boat and train to Italy, finishing up in Venice. They returned to London at the beginning of October.

  Chapter Nine

  Marriage – The Second Major Breakdown, 1913

  The honeymoon was both a success and a failure. They talked a great deal, explored the towns, walked in the mornings and read or wrote in the afternoons. Virginia completed The Voyage Out. Leonard finished The Village in the Jungle – which Virginia thought ‘amazingly good’1 – and began The Wise Virgins. They were compatible as companions and Virginia enjoyed being ‘chronically nomadic and monogamic’. But sexually their relationship was troubled. Leonard’s attempts to make love had brought on ‘such a violent state of excitement’ and hysteria ‘that he had had to stop’.2

  Without having been an accompanying fly on the wall it is impossible to know what transpired in the Woolfs’ bedroom. One can guess, however, a possible sequence of events. Virginia was anxious and feared Leonard as a sexual lover. Jekyll threatened to become Hyde. Leonard restrained himself, probably for several days. He tried to talk Virginia’s fears through and reassure her, but her anxiety was too deep for her to respond rationally and she remained tense. Leonard felt growing exasperation and helplessness. Finally, sometime in the first fortnight, Leonard lost patience and attempted intercourse forcefully. The effect, to judge from Leonard’s account, was explosive. Leonard may have partially penetrated, and then ejaculated prematurely and lost his erection in the face of Virginia’s hysteria and panic.

  Virginia wrote from Spain to her friend Ka Cox on 4 September to say she had lost her virginity, adding:

  Why do you think people make such a fuss about marriage and copulation? Why do some of our friends change upon losing chastity? Possibly my great age makes it less of a catastrophe, but certainly I find the climax immensely exaggerated. Except for a sustained good humour (Leonard shan’t see this) due to the fact that every twinge of anger is at once visited upon my husband, I might still be Miss Stephen.3

  Leonard’s sexual experience had come from Singalese prostitutes and enthusiastic ‘amateurs’. Then he had been concerned mainly with reaching a climax, not with pleasing the woman, and afterwards he had been assailed by a sense of ‘degradation’. Leonard assumed that virgins were naturally cold, but lost their frigidity once aroused in married life. He had no one to discuss sexual problems with. Strachey and Moore were out of the question and Clive Bell, who could have given him good advice, was bitterly jealous; his scurrilous remarks about Leonard had made both Leonard and Virginia angry. Bella might have helped but she was abroad with her husband.

  In December, Leonard and Virginia went together to ask Vanessa’s advice. Unexpectedly, she was not only unhelpful but made her sister feel humiliated and angry.

  I perhaps annoyed her [Vanessa reported to Clive] but may have consoled him [Leonard] by saying that I thought she never had understood or sympathised with sexual passion in men. They were very anxious to know when I had my first orgasm.4

  There is a ring of triumph behind Vanessa’s words. After the trouble and hurt Virginia had caused, it must have been gratifying to inform Clive that Virginia was sexually inadequate. Virginia might be the more gifted and clever, but Vanessa was the better woman.

  Virginia’s sexual rejection of Leonard, in such contrast to their close companionship, affected him profoundly. A partner’s resistance stimulates some people, but prolonged and bitter rejection inhibits and eventually takes away desire and a man’s potency. By the end of the honeymoon Leonard had probably ceased to be sexually aroused by Virginia, and may even have been impotent in her presence. Certainly all attempts at sexual intercourse were ‘abandoned quite soon’.5 Lust had been removed from love. Thereafter Leonard seems to have displaced all his sexual drive into work. He never had an affair; and even his relationship with Trekkie Parsons, after Virginia’s death, was without sex.

  Leonard was ashamed and resentful. He had failed as a man and if that were widely known, he would be ridiculed. Frustration made him restless, which perhaps explains why the honeymoon couple rarely stopped for more than a night or two in any town. When they finally reached Venice, before returning home, Virginia was ill, headachy, exhausted and reluctant to eat. Forced to rest for a week she was content to let Leonard take charge and feed her on ‘buttered toast, cakes and ices’. Leonard was changing from a lustful husband into a maternal protector.

  Leonard poured his emotions into The Wise Virgins, which he wrote at great speed, as though under pressure.

  Harry, Jewish, dissatisfied with his life, is the central character living with his family in suburbia. He meets the gentile sisters Camilla (Virginia) and Katharine (Vanessa), and is drawn to Camilla: fascinating but frightening to young men, possessing purity, coldness, of hills and snow – something that might at any moment break out destructive of you – of her’. Harry can imagine kissing Katharine, but Camilla seems beyond reach: ‘fine ladies and Dresden china don’t kiss’. The sisters ‘had no blood in them’ and were ‘cold, pale souls’. Harry then switches his attack and pours scorn on his mother, Mrs Davis, who is unambiguously Marie Woolf: ‘a handsome large woman – big curved nose, the curling full lips, great brown eyes, a … sing-song nasal voice – talked trivialities’.6

  Friends and relatives thought badly of Leonard for publishing the novel in 1914, but no amount of criticism would deflect him. Virginia did not read the book until 1915, just before she became manic.

  * * *

  Virginia, despite recurrent headaches, coped with moving house from Brunswick Square to rooms in Clifford’s Inn, near Fleet Street, but by January cyclothymic depression was
so exacerbating her symptoms that Leonard began keeping a daily record. He told Vanessa of his worries and sought her view on the dangers of Virginia becoming pregnant. The two sisters had in fact recently talked over the question of pregnancy, and perhaps Vanessa had even proffered advice on intercourse. Vanessa was surprised to discover that Leonard had strong objections, for she knew that both Savage and the nursing home matron Jean Thomas thought Virginia would benefit from motherhood. ‘I wonder why Leonard has gradually come to think childbearing so dangerous?’, she asked Virginia at the end of January.7

  Leonard had by now convinced himself that Virginia would not ‘be able to stand the strain and stress of childbearing’.8 He again consulted Savage, who ‘brushed my doubts aside’, and Leonard sought other medical advice: Maurice Craig, who was currently treating Vanessa for depression; Maurice Wright whom Leonard had consulted over his familial tremor; and Theo Hyslop, a writer of eccentric articles on women. Maurice Wright agreed with Savage, but Hyslop sat on the fence and suggested delaying a decision. Craig, however, who was by far the best qualified and most impressive of the three, agreed strongly with Leonard. Leonard also saw Jean Thomas, a suggestible woman, and easily persuaded her to change her mind. Leonard, when his mind was made up, was a formidable force and he eventually won Vanessa round to his way of thinking. He had no doubts; the doctors ‘confirmed my fears and were strongly against her having children’.

  Virginia now knew that Leonard was determined to stop her having children, although what they discussed between themselves is unrecorded. Leonard reported each new piece of ‘expert’ advice but Virginia was too depressed and demoralised to protest. She fell back on fantasy, as when Thoby died, and in April she told Violet Dickinson:

  We aren’t going to have a baby, but we want to have one, and six months in the country or so is said to be necessary first.9

  Her resentment as buried beneath depression, but she was very angry with Leonard, was he was to discover, and furious with the doctors. Fourteen years later she told a friend, ‘I’m always angry with myself for not having forced Leonard to take the risk in spite of the doctors.’10

  Virginia’s desire for children was not deeply rooted. She expressed a wish for them only when she was depressed. Waking in the early hours, tossing and turning, she tormented herself: ‘I wish I were dead … Vanessa. Children. Failure.’11 She envied Vanessa with her children round her: ‘a little more self-control on my part and we might have had a boy of twelve and a girl of ten.’12 She took a different line when in high spirits: then she scarcely wanted children; life was too short. She had to write.

  She enjoyed Vanessa’s children when they were older, especially her niece Angelica, but not over prolonged periods. When her sister asked her to look after her two boys during her last confinement (admittedly it was in the vulnerable month of January), Virginia took to her bed and the boys had to go elsewhere. The presence of children of her own would have hindered Virginia’s creative life and been a health hazard.

  Leonard was right to doubt Virginia’s ability to cope with childbearing. The risk of breaking down in the first two weeks after childbirth is greater – almost 25 per cent more – for a woman who has had an episode of manic depression, or a strong family history of the disease. Profound hormonal changes occur in a woman after delivery: the fall in circulating oestrogen levels affects the neuro-transmitter patterns in the brain and results in varying degrees of depression. Many mothers experience ‘post-natal blues’, but these are short-lived. A woman with manic depressive genes is liable to become far more disturbed. Vanessa was depressed after each of her three children, and the chances of Virginia becoming mad after childbirth were high.

  However, a manic depressive breakdown after childbirth is not entirely due to genetic influence, and emotional factors play an important part. Studies of puerperal illness often overlook their importance, because it is difficult to measure subtle emotional stress. Such ‘life events’ as death and divorce, or a husband’s alcoholism, are easily recorded, but how accurately can a researcher measure reluctance to become a father, the aggressive fantasies of a pregnant mother-to-be, or ambivalent feelings towards a husband?

  The cyclothymic Sylvia Plath, for instance, was depressed after each of her two children. Her marriage appeared outwardly stable but below the surface she was angry, envious of her husband Ted Hughes’s success as a poet and gloomy about her own work. A probing search will show that most manic depressives who develop post-natal illness harbour resentment towards the partner. Those who remain well, or suffer no more than short-lived minor depression, are generally at peace with themselves and their partner at the time of delivery.

  Many manic depressives are cheerful during pregnancy; cyclothymic swings stop or lessen, probably because of changing hormone levels. After birth the cyclothymic rhythm resumes, and if delivery coincides with the time of an expected swing, the postnatal reaction is potentiated.

  Every post-natal manic depressive illness involves the interaction of cyclothymic, hormonal and emotional factors, and it is always difficult to predict the outcome of a pregnancy. It is impossible to know how Virginia would have reacted to childbirth. She could have been well during the pregnancy, and with a supportive Leonard in attendance at delivery might have had no serious aftereffects, particularly had the baby been born in summer. But Leonard’s ban on motherhood may have had causes other than concern about Virginia. Perhaps he wanted to avoid the spoiling effect children might have had on his own as well as Virginia’s life and work. He enjoyed training his pets, but what he termed ‘the much less attractive and savage human baby’ was a different matter.13 Accommodation in the early years of marriage was cramped, and finances were not good enough to cover a full-time nanny, so essential for Virginia. Leonard would have needed a more substantial income, and that would have entailed doing less congenial work.

  Virginia’s mental state continued to deteriorate. Writing with ‘a kind of tortured intensity’, she finished revising The Voyage Out, and Leonard delivered the manuscript to Gerald Duckworth’s publishing firm at the beginning of March.14 It was accepted, and at once Virginia’s anxieties came to centre round the novel, its possible reception of scorn and derision. She lay awake at night worrying over the book. She ate little, headaches were severe and she became more and more indecisive. She clung to Leonard, reluctant to let him out of her sight.

  Leonard believed The Voyage Out to be the root cause of Virginia’s distress. Vanessa thought the same. She told Roger Fry that Virginia’s ‘worrying over what people will think of her novel … seems really to be the entire cause of her breakdown’.15 But the novel, although some cause of anxiety, was not the chief reason for Virginia’s turmoil, but rather a focal point for the gathering storm.

  In a sense, every manic depressive breakdown reflects battle with a close companion, suppressed anger, fear of rejection, resentment struggling against love. As the cyclothyme’s mental defences crumble, perplexity grows and behaviour becomes increasingly inconsistent. In 1904 Virginia had struggled with Vanessa, driven her away, clung to her, pleaded for affection, abused her. In 1913 the pathological process was slower, but the pattern was the same. All Virginia’s major breakdowns had their beginnings in the cyclothymic depression of late winter/spring, and with each one went powerful emotional conflicts.

  Leonard, in 1913, ruled his marriage as he had the natives in Ceylon. He tolerated no disagreement; on important issues he was sure he knew best for Virginia. Virginia was at first angry. Leonard’s highhanded action in stamping her unfit for motherhood, his bullying manner, enraged her. Yet she had to keep her feelings under control, for Leonard was her vital protection, and the more depressed she was the greater her dependence. She clung to Leonard, unable to work, convinced she was a burden, was ruining his life, that he should leave her. She ate almost nothing, slept for no more than an hour or two at a time, and was so ‘terribly depressed’ that Leonard feared suicide. He made her see Savage and on 25 July sh
e reluctantly agreed to go back to the Twickenham nursing home.

  Anger against Leonard surfaced after a few days in the nursing home; she did not trust him, did not love him, doubted his love, wanted separation. Leonard was extremely upset and tried to discover the cause:

  If I have done anything wrong to you and which has displeased you, you would tell me, wouldn’t you? I do adore you so, Mandy, that I would do anything to change any beastliness in myself, if I knew how it had shown itself.16

  He stayed away from the nursing home for several days, probably on medical advice, and his absence, in conjunction with rest and isolation, halted the paranoid outbursts. Contritely, she assured him,

  nothing you have done, since I knew you, has been in any way beastly – how could it? You’ve been absolutely perfect to me. It’s all my fault … I do believe in you absolutely, and never for a second do I think you’ve told me a lie. Goodbye, darling Mongoose – I do want you and I believe in spite of my vile imaginings the other day that I love you and that you love me.17

  Virginia left the nursing home on 11 August, seeming to be a good deal better, and she and Leonard went to Asham for a fortnight. But no real improvement was possible in so short a time, and she quickly returned to agitation and depressive thinking. Leonard was completely out of his depth, helpless to counter Virginia’s delusional ideas, only with difficulty able to persuade her to eat and rest.

  Dr Savage had made the fatal mistake of bargaining with a seriously depressed patient, an extraordinary error for someone of his experience, and another sign that his judgement was distorted by his friendship. To persuade Virginia to have treatment he had promised she could go away for a holiday with Leonard in August, although he must have known she would not be well enough.