by Peter Dally
worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion.11
There is no record of Virginia seeing Craig, or any psychiatrist after 1920. She relied on the family doctor to look after her. Male practitioners mostly made little impression, and after returning to London she had a woman doctor, Dr Elly Rendel, whom she liked and trusted and may have occasionally confided in, for Elly had the enormous advantage of being Lytton Strachey’s eldest sister’s daughter, and was therefore almost part of the Bloomsbury circle.
Virginia’s symptoms in the 1920s came more from tension than depression. She felt frustrated and under-stimulated, bored by suburban life. ‘Here I sit at Richmond, and like a lantern stood in the middle of a field my light goes up in darkness.’12 She felt life was passing her by: ‘out here no one comes in to waste my time pleasurably’.13 She looked enviously at Vanessa, ‘astride her fine Arab, life I mean’, and told her:
Yes, I was rather depressed when you saw me – what it comes to is this: you say, ‘I do think you lead a dull respectable absurd life – lots of money, no children, everything so settled: and conventional. Look at me now – only sixpence a year – lovers – Paris – life – love – art – excitement – God! I must be off.’ This leaves me in tears.14
Virginia was always gloomy when she returned to Richmond from Rodmell; ‘one lives in the brain there – I slip easily from writing to reading with spaces between of walking’.15 Friends came to stay and she was near Vanessa. Richmond had nothing to commend it. She could not face ‘a life spent, mute and mitigated, in the suburbs, just as I had it in mind to go full speed ahead’.16
She determined to move to London, and was angered by Leonard’s opposition. She was convinced that his reasons were selfish. He maintained, through thick and thin, that her health would quickly deteriorate living in London, and bring on another bout of madness. As it was, whenever she went to London for a party, he was like an anxious father, immediately on the telephone if she was late home, ‘expressing displeasure. “Very foolish … your heart bad”’, and she returned feeling guilty and resentful.17
Eventually, faced with Leonard’s trump card for the umpteenth time, Virginia exploded. She would no longer let him use her health as an excuse for doing what he wanted. Because he liked living in the suburbs and disliked the social life which she found so necessary, he wanted to bring her down to his level:
to catch trains, always to waste time, to sit here and wait for Leonard to come in … when alternatively, I might go and hear a tune, or have a look at a picture, or find something at the British Museum, or go adventuring among human beings … now I’m tied, imprisoned, inhibited For ever to be suburban.18
Virginia’s anger overflowed. It was a far cry from 1913 when she had silently given in to Leonard’s decision against motherhood and her suppressed anger had fermented into madness. She demanded he examine himself and their differences. He was too much of a puritan, of a disciplinarian.
There is [she told him] a very different element in me; my social side, your intellectual side. This social side is very genuine to me … It is a piece of jewellery I inherit from my mother – a joy in laughter, something that is stimulated, not wholly or vainly selfishly, by contact with my friends. And then ideas leap in me. Moreover, for my work now, I want freer intercourse, wider intercourse … In Richmond this is impossible. Either we have arduous parties at long intervals, or I make frenzied dashes up to London, and leave guiltily as the clock strikes eleven.19
Leonard dug his heels in, but slowly came to recognise that Virginia could not be dissuaded, that it could be dangerous to continue opposing her. The turning point came in October when Leonard was late returning to Monks House. Virginia, who had been tense for most of the day, became agitated, and suddenly associated Leonard’s absence with the violence of the wind and rain, and the deaths of 41 miners in a recent coal pit disaster, and the sudden death of a distant relative.
It was a wet blustery night, and for no good reason she set out across the fields to meet the bus Leonard might be on. It was empty. ‘The old devil has once more got his spine through the waves’, she thought. Then, she
became physically rigid. Reality, so I thought, was unveiled. And there was something noble in feeling like this; tragic, not at all petty. Then cold white lights went over the fields, and went out; and I stood under the great trees at Iford waiting for the lights of the bus. And that went by; and I felt lonelier. There was a man with a barrow walking into Lewes, who looked at me. But I could toy with, at least control all this, until suddenly, after the last likely train had come in I felt it was intolerable to sit about, and must do the final thing, which was to go to London. Off I rode, without much time, against such a wind; and again I had satisfaction in being matched with powerful things, like wind and dark. I battled, had to walk; got on; drove ahead; dropped the torch; picked it up, and so on again without any light. Saw men and women walking together; thought you’re safe and happy, I’m an outcast; took my ticket, had 3 minutes to spare, and then, turning the corner of the station stairs, saw Leonard, coming alone, bending rather, like a person walking very quick, in his mackintosh. He was rather cold and angry (as perhaps, was natural). And then, not to show my feelings, I went outside and did something to my bicycle … All the way back … I was feeling My God, that’s over. I’m out of that. It’s over. Really, it was a physical feeling, of lightness and relief and safety, and yet there was too something terrible behind it – the fact of this pain, I suppose; which continued for several days.20
Virginia’s frustration and anger – always a dangerous emotion for a cyclothyme – had pushed her into short-lived madness. Cyclothymic swings were unusual and never large in October and there was no dangerous potentiation of emotional forces. Madness lasted no more than a few hours, although after-effects lingered for several days. Leonard, who must have been shaken to encounter a wet wild-looking Virginia, was finally forced to accept the need to move to London.
As she searched for a suitable London house Virginia felt ‘ten years younger’.21 She looked into the future, convinced that 1924 was ‘almost certainly bound to be their most eventful year.’ On 9 January the Woolfs obtained a ten-year lease of 52 Tavistock Square and Virginia’s excitement rose; so much lay ahead, ‘music, talk, friendship, city views, books, publishing, something central and inexplicable, as it hasn’t been since 1913.’22 Spring melancholia was light. Even Leonard’s initial pessimism and gloom, and his retiring to bed for four days with ’flu, failed to disturb her. When he solemnly told her his worst fears were coming to pass and visitors and social life were beginning to take up most of the day and interfere with work, she laughed loudly and told him he was imagining it all.
In fact, once Leonard was accustomed to the new home he found it far more convenient for his work than Richmond, and the Hogarth Press fitted easily into the basement of Tavistock Square. Virginia’s health showed no sign of deteriorating. If anything, her stability was strengthened by her ‘victory’ over Leonard. She was writing Mrs Dalloway at this time and Clarissa Dalloway says of Peter Walsh (Clarisa’s old lover, not unlike Leonard) there must be
a little licence, a little independence between people living together day in and day out in the same home; which Richard [Clarissa’s husband] gave her and she him … But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable.23
Chapter Twelve
Vita Sackville-West
Virginia first met Vita Sackville-West in December 1922 at a dinner party given by Clive, but the two did not begin to know one another until 1924. Virginia fell passionately in love and, in December 1925, they became lovers.
It was an extraordinary but necessary development in Virginia’s life. She did not contrive to fall in love with Vita. Love came naturally, for Virgi
nia was now psychologically ready for a sexual relationship and was sufficiently emancipated and secure with Leonard to allow her emotions freer rein.
Virginia could never have been promiscuous; for her, a sexual relationship had to co-exist with love. A lover, of necessity, had to be a woman, for Leonard was far too important for Virginia to risk upsetting through an affair with another man, even had she been attracted to one. She was still capable of flirting occasionally with Clive, but no more. She knew that Leonard would not tolerate a male rival. On the other hand Virginia sensed, not without qualms at first, that Leonard could accept her involvement with another woman, and not see it as threatening their marriage or affecting his position.
Vita, that ‘lovely, gifted aristocratic Sackville-West’, attracted Virginia from their first meeting.1 Vita’s manner – ‘no false shyness or modesty’ – and her aristocratic background, ‘all those ancestors and centuries, and silver and gold’, captured her imagination.2 ‘Snob as I am, I trace her passions 500 years back and they become romantic to me.’3
Vita invited Virginia to Knole, the great house where she had been born and which she loved. They lunched with Vita’s father, Lord Sackville, the third Baron, and among others, Geoffrey Scott, Vita’s only heterosexual lover, whom she was in the process of ditching. Afterwards, as Virginia travelled home in the train, absorbed in Vita’s ancestors and the wonders of Knole, the thought struck her that Knole was ‘capable of housing all the desperate poor of Judd Street’ (a slum area of Bloomsbury);4 an observation worthy of Leonard, and a reminder that he was never far away.
She was intrigued by Vita’s reputation as a lesbian, so ‘violently Sapphic’, and the still fresh stories of her notorious affair in 1920 with Violet Trefusis. ‘I will tell you a secret’, she told her dying friend, Jacques Raverat; ‘I want to incite my lady to elope with me next.’5
Vita was married to Harold Nicolson, himself a homosexual. Physical sex between them had ended, but their marriage was firmly anchored and neither was disturbed by the other’s sexual encounters. Vita was much the stronger character, but she looked to her husband to rein her in and prevent impulsive actions which she would later regret. There were obvious similarities between the Nicolsons’ and Woolfs’ marriages, which perhaps Virginia was underlining when she told Vita ‘in all London, you and I alone like being married’.6
Virginia saw Vita from many angles: ‘a ravishing beauty and commanding presence’;7 a ‘race horse’ with ‘no sharp brain’;8 ‘virginal, savage, patrician’.9 Above all she saw her as a maternal protector: ‘open the top button of your jersey’, she told Vita, ‘and you will see, nestling inside, a lively squirrel, with the most inquisitive habits, but a dear creature all the same.’10 The affair took two years to mature, and by the beginning of 1925 Virginia knew she was in love. She thought of Vita much of the time, desiring to go with her ‘at once into the silent dusk’, but she was uneasy over Leonard’s possible reactions. As much to involve Leonard as to please Vita, she suggested Vita write a book for the Hogarth Press, and in September 1924 the manuscript of Seducers in Ecuador, dedicated to Virginia, was delivered in person. The book sold well, like most of Vita’s works, appealing to a wider readership than Virginia’s novels, but both women knew without question that Virginia was the better writer.
Leonard regarded Vita as a ‘sentimental, romantic, naive and competent writer’, ‘an animal at the height of its powers, a beautiful flower in full bloom’.11 He seems to have liked her well enough from the beginning and never came to see her in any way as a rival. She had, he thought, a ‘manly good sense and simplicity about her’.12
Leonard had a theory that women developed ‘little bursts of passion for one another’ which might last ‘for a day or two up to, sometimes, twelve months’ before becoming close friends or drifting apart,13 and he seems to have seen Virginia’s interest in Vita at first in that light, along the lines of her friendships with Ottoline Morell and Katherine Mansfield.
Throughout 1924 and 1925 Vita flirted with Virginia and raised her expectations. ‘Will you ever play truant to Bloomsbury and culture, I wonder, and come travelling with me?… I would rather go to Spain with you than with anyone,’ Vita wrote early in the friendship, adding provocatively, ‘You like people through the brain better than through the heart – forgive me if I am wrong.’14 Virginia at once took up the challenge: ‘It [your letter] gave me a great deal of pain – which is, I’ve no doubt, the first stage of intimacy – no friends, no heart, only an indifferent head. Never mind: I enjoyed your abuse very much.’15 She visited Vita’s home, Long Barn, and Vita came to stay the night at Monks House. By the end of 1924 Vita was constantly in her thoughts. In a last-ditch attempt to hold back her infatuation, she told herself Vita was ‘like an over-ripe grape in features, moustached, pouting, will be a little heavy’, but it was too late. ‘I like her; could tack her on to my equipage for all time … if life allowed, this might be a friendship of a sort.’16
1924 was a mentally stable year and Virginia wrote Mrs Dalloway ‘without a break from illness’17 but 1925 was very different, and Virginia was frequently ill. Cyclothymic depression continued from mid-January until early March and was deep enough to keep her in bed and limit her activities. She recovered in time to go on holiday with Leonard to Cassis in the South of France. It was a great success, she noted, a sure sign that her marriage was secure.
L and I were too too happy, as they say [she wrote in her diary on 8 April]. Nobody shall say of me that I have not known perfect happiness, but few could put their finger on the moment, or say what made it. Even I myself, stirring occasionally in the pool of content, could only say, but this is all I want; could not think of anything better, and had only my half superstitious feeling as the Gods who must, when they have created happiness, grudge it.
She crossed her fingers to add, ‘Not if you get it in unexpected ways though.’18
The lift of mood was prolonged, and even the death of her friend Jacques Raverat, with whom she had corresponded with unusual intimacy during his slow death from multiple sclerosis, failed to dampen her spirits:
I no longer feel inclined to doff the cap to death [she wrote]. I like to go out of the room talking, with an unfinished casual sentence on my lips. This is the effect it [his death] had on me – no leave taking, no submission – but someone stepping out into the darkness – more and more do I repeat my own version of Montaigne: ‘It’s life that matters.’19
She saw little of Vita during the first half of 1925. Both women were busy writing, and Vita was finally disposing of Geoffrey Scott. The Common Reader and Mrs Dalloway had been published and acclaimed. Virginia was pleased by Morgan Foster’s praise, and puzzled by Vita’s comment on the novel, unsure how to take ‘will-of-the-wisp, a dazzling and lovely acquaintance’.20 Ideas for To the Lighthouse had been forming for some time and she was impatient to begin, but there were too many diversions. During that summer she seemed in perpetual motion; she did not ‘get any idle hours … heaven knows we have had enough visitors.’22
The Woolfs went to Monks House in August. It was an exeptionally hot summer. On 19 August the traditional birthday party for Virginia’s nephew Quentin, on this occasion combined with Maynard Keynes’s marriage to Lydia Lopokova, was held at Charleston, where Virginia was the life and soul of the party. The heat and noise and exhaustion proved too much and she suddenly fainted. Afterwards, lying in bed with headache and aching limbs and frightening bursts of racing pulse, she blamed herself: ‘Why couldn’t I see or feel that all this time I was getting a little used up and riding on a flat tyre?’23 Depression followed the hypomania and, because of her exhaustion, was prolonged; she was in and out of bed for much of the next six months, and was not fully well until the following March. Depression was not severe and the headache and insomnia were often little more than a nuisance, and did not suggest danger, but Leonard was worried and insisted on rest and quiet. Virginia, however, was unable to relax. She desperately wanted to see
Vita; ‘I try to invent you for myself,’ she wrote from her sick bed.24
Vita was gratifyingly concerned over Virginia’s illness, wanted to visit at once, but Leonard would allow no visitors until he thought she was better. He attributed the relapse, as he saw it, to the strain of Mrs Dalloway, and he gave no hint of suspecting Vita. When Vita was finally allowed, Virginia’s satisfaction was enormous, and she incautiously revealed the depth of her feelings, ‘blurted out “truths” which the cautious respectability of health conceals’.25
Virginia was improving when, on 13 October, she heard that Harold Nicolson was going to Teheran as Counsellor at the Embassy and Vita would be joining him. She was ‘filled with envy and despair’,26 and at once fell back into bed, panicky, ‘a good deal of rat-gnawing at the back of my head’.27 Leonard and the doctor forbade all activity, including writing letters, but she was allowed to receive them, and was hugely relieved to learn that Vita would not be leaving until January. But for the next two months she was a semi-invalid, her activities severely curtailed by Leonard.
Leonard finally came to acknowledge the force of Virginia’s feelings for Vita. To his credit he at once did everything in his power to help his wife. He wrote to Vita – it was not unusual for Leonard to write for Virginia when she was ill – emphasising how much her visits meant and how much she would be missed.
Vita came at once in response to Leonard’s letter. The two women had tea together, and when Virginia mentioned that her doctor had advised her to go away, Vita immediately invited her to convalesce at Long Barn, adding, ‘I shall be alone after Harold has gone’ (he left for Persia on 4 November).28 Virginia was put into a state of dithering excitement, unable to make up her mind. She wanted to accept but feared she might disappoint Vita, and the thought of leaving Leonard frightened her. She waited nervously for Vita to confirm the invitation although, as Leonard pointed out, Vita had made it clear she wanted her to come; Virginia had only to choose a date.
