The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

by Peter Dally

  When no letter arrived, and Vita failed to make an expected visit – impossible because of thick fog and illness – Virginia sank back into bed ‘like a tired child’, wanting to ‘weep away this life of care … If I do not see her now, I shall not – ever; for the moment of intimacy will be gone next summer.’29 She felt neglected, unwanted, unloved. Leonard told her she was behaving like a silly child, and that she should make arrangements to go to Long Barn. ‘By God – how satisfactory after, I think, twelve years, to have any human being to whom one can speak so directly as I to L!’ she wrote in her diary.30

  The next day Vita’s letter explaining her absence arrived and at once, spurred on by Leonard, Virginia wrote, ‘Would you like me to come to you for a day or two, if you are alone, before the 20th?’31 Vita was delighted, and on 17 December Virginia travelled down to Long Barn and spent three days alone with Vita. Leonard joined them on the 19th and Vita drove them back to London next day.

  * * *

  Virginia was in love. She revelled in the ‘glow and the flattery and the festival’.32 Above all, she basked in Vita’s love. ‘These Sapphists love women; friendship is untinged by amorousity,’ she noted approvingly.33 But passionate as she felt, she remained in control of herself. Part of her stood back and observed:

  What is the effect of all this on me? Very mixed. There is [Vita’s] maturity and full-breastedness; her being so much in full sail on the high tides, where I am coasting down backwaters; her capacity, I mean, to represent her country, to visit Chatsworth, to control silver, servants, Chow dogs; her motherhood (but she is a little cold and offhand with her boys), her being, in short (what I have never been), a real woman. Then there is some voluptuousness about her; the grapes are ripe, and not reflective. No. In brain and insight she is not as highly organised as I am. But then she is aware of this, and so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always most wished from everyone. What L gives me, and Nessa gives me, and Vita, in her more clumsy, external way, tries to give me.34

  Leonard, who had sent Vita instructions to ensure Virginia went to bed early, was pleased by the all-round improvement. ’Flu came in January, but it was a mild dip and Virginia was well enough to dine with Clive and Vita and Leonard shortly before Vita left for Persia. Her departure left Virginia lost in ‘a dim November fog; the lights dulled and damped’. Vita might not be clever but she was ‘abundant and fruitful; truthful too. She taps so many sources of life; repose and variety … I feel a lack of stimulus, of marked days, now Vita is gone.’35 She conjured up the ‘candlelight radiance’, Vita ‘walking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape-clustered, pearl hung’ that was ‘the secret of her glamour’.36 But every now and again she reassured herself she loved Leonard deeply, that Leonard remained the linchpin of her life; ‘one has room for a good many relationships’.37

  Leonard made no difficulties. Had he done so the affair would probably have finished, leaving Virginia resentful and unstable, and Vita would have retreated, afraid of Leonard’s wrath. Whatever his deepest feelings Leonard tolerated the affair; he would return uncomplainingly to London after a weekend at Rodmell, leaving Virginia to stay on and spend a night or two alone with Vita, and he would raise no objections to her visiting Vita at Long Barn. If he suspected the sexual nature of the friendship, he wisely never discussed the matter, despite gossip at Bloomsbury gatherings. Clive had the bad taste – not unusual in Bloomsbury – to ask Vita at a New Year’s Eve party if she had slept with Virginia; to which she returned a virtuous ‘No!’38

  Vanessa learnt of the affair early on, for not only did Virginia have a need to share the secret but she wanted to boast of her conquest:

  Vita is now arriving to spend two nights alone with me – L is going back. I say no more, as you are bored by Vita, bored by love, bored by me … Still, the June nights are long and warm, the roses flowering, and the garden full of lust and bees.39

  Leonard would have been inhuman not to have felt an occasional spark of jealousy. He accepted Vita, and if she irritated him, he kept it hidden, hiding resentment behind boredom. Vita was half-afraid of him, such a ‘funny, grim, solitary creature’,40 she told Harold, and she sometimes hesitated to telephone Virginia in case Leonard answered. But she made huge efforts to be friendly. She gave the Woolfs a spaniel bitch puppy to which Leonard became devoted. Her books sold well and made money for the Woolfs, and she remained loyal to the Hogarth Press despite Leonard’s penny-pinching ways, and higher offers from other publishers.

  Virginia was quick to notice Leonard’s resentment, real or otherwise. Although she told herself that, ‘whatever I think, I can rap out, suddenly to L’,41 she tried to hide the depth of her feelings, unlike Vita who held back few secrets from Harold. Occasionally, if she thought Leonard had been boorish with Vita, she criticised him for spoiling the visit by ‘glooming’. After one such occasion he reacted by telling her their ‘relations had not been so good lately’, and she was left feeling ‘an elderly, fussy, ugly, incompetent woman, vain, chattering and futile’.42

  Their quarrels never lasted long, but Virginia determined to be ‘more considerate of Leonard’s feelings, and so keep more steadily at our ordinary level of intimacy and ease: a level, I think, no other couple so long married reaches and keeps so constantly.’43 She took the precaution of arranging for Vita’s more revealing letters to be sent under cover of uncompromising ones which could safely be shown to Leonard.

  After Vita’s departure for Persia, Virginia’s depression lingered on for another six weeks. Then, in March, as though a dam had been opened, depression gave way to hypomania; energy returned twofold and she resumed writing To the Lighthouse, ‘never have I written so easily, imagined so profusely’.44 By mid-April she had finished the first part and begun the second; ‘Why am I so flown with words and, apparently, free to do what I like?’ she asked herself.45

  Vita returned home on 16 May. Virginia was apprehensive: ‘The shock of meeting after absence; how shy one is’.46 But once they met, shyness gave way to joy, not due to ‘egotism but your seduction’, she told Vita. So excited and wakeful was she that another ‘dribbling little temperature’ and ‘nerve exhaustion headache’ forced her to return to bed. It was short-lived but she continued to do too much and exhaust herself. Leonard was censorious and tried to restrain her, but she felt at one with the ‘Spirit of Delight’,47 free, capable of anything. She turned her attention to home comforts. She had already spent some of her profits from writing on modernising Monks House, putting in two lavatories and a bath and a hot water system. She wanted to be comfortable, and Vita to be impressed, and now with this in mind she bought new armchairs and rugs. A row blew up with Leonard who wanted to spend available money on the garden, but Virginia stuck to her guns and won the day.

  * * *

  Vita returned to Persia on 28 January 1927, having spent the morning with Virginia, infatuated. ‘What intelligence – what perception. Sensitiveness in the best sense, imagination, poetry, culture…’48 ‘I really adore her. Not “in love” but just love – devotion.’49 Harold in Teheran was unusually jealous, although he termed it ‘self defence’, and urged Vita to be careful; although ‘from your point of view, I know that the friendship can only be enriching’. He was ‘a little anxious about it from her [Virginia’s] point of view as I can’t help feeling that her stability and poise is based on a rather precarious foundation.’50 Vita assured him she would tell him of any ‘muddle with Virginia’.51 Despite Virginia missing Vita the spring melancholia was minimal; she felt sure of Vita and at ease with Leonard, and she was engaged in finishing To the Lighthouse. Leonard enthused when shown the manuscript; ‘much my best book, and it is a “masterpiece” … a psychological poem.’52 She worked on the proofs, but always at the back of her thoughts was Vita. In February she ‘came out’, with ‘the most important event in my life since marriage – so Clive described it’;53 her long hair was cut off and, she told Vita, shingled and bingled. It w
as a signal to all three of her protectors that she was leaving childhood behind. One night in March, she thought up ‘a whole fantasy … an escapade after these serious, poetic, experimental books whose form is always so closely considered’. It would be fun, written ‘at the top of my speed … Sapphism is to be suggested. Satire is to be the main note – satire and wildness.’54 By October the ideas had crystallised into Orlando.

  Vita returned in May with Harold, who had completed his tour of duty in Persia. The excitement proved too much and within a short time Virginia had ‘a very sharp headache’ and an erratic jumping pulse. Leonard forced her to rest; ‘a good thing in some way’, she admitted, ‘for I got control of society at an early stage, and circumvented my headache, without a complete smash’.55

  It was gratifying to have Vita home but Virginia found Harold’s presence at Long Barn irritating, despite his friendliness. More than a hint of resentment lies behind Virginia’s diary entries: ‘a spontaneous childlike man’,56 ‘flimsy’ compared to Leonard (who in turn thought him ‘too commonplace’).57 Virginia was also sensing a sexual restlessness on Vita’s part, which made her feel ‘elderly and valetudinarian’.58

  In October Virginia began Orlando, a never-ageing Vita who changes from male to female, beginning with the year 1500. As she wrote, ‘it rushed off like a rocket’,59 and she finished it by March. The book started as ‘a joke’,60 but became what Nigel Nicolson has called ‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature’.61 Virginia told Vita, it is about ‘the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind … Shall you mind?’62 Vita was entranced: ‘what fun for you; what fun for me. You see, any vengeance that you ever want to take will be ready in your hand.’63 Orlando was published that October, dedicated to Vita.

  Leonard was not upset, and Virginia was surprised how seriously he took the book, his opinion being that it was ‘in some ways better than The Lighthouse’.64 Perhaps it was his way of avoiding any embarrassing discussion. The person most upset was Vita’s mother, who called Virginia a ‘wicked madwoman’ and tried ineffectually to prevent the book being reviewed.65

  That July Virginia spent a weekend at Long Barn, where Vita confessed to having spent a night with Mary Hutchinson, Clive’s ex-mistress. Virginia tried her best to see it as a passing peccadillo, but warned Vita to take care lest she find Virginia’s ‘soft crevices lined with hooks’.66 When a more serious affair with Mary Campbell, wife of the poet Roy Campbell, threatened, Virginia became alarmed. She told Vita:

  Never do I leave you without thinking it’s for the last time since I am always certain you’ll be off and on with the next … since all our intercourse is tinged with this melancholy on my part. Perhaps we gain in intensity what we lack in the sober comfortable virtues of a prolonged and safe and respectable and chaste and cold-blooded friendship.67

  Vita’s affair caused trouble. Roy Campbell found out and threatened murder and suicide, and an alarmed Vita confessed everything to Virginia, tempering the blow by swearing that Virginia remained ‘absolutely vital’. Virginia was only partly mollified, and for some years, until she began to come to terms with what was clearly the inevitable, depression was frequent and often prolonged.

  At the end of September Vita and Virginia spent a week together in France. The holiday had been planned and discussed for months. Virginia very much wanted to go, but was worried by ‘7 days alone with Vita’, in case they ‘found each other out’.68 She was also very anxious at separating from Leonard for so long. She dithered, and in the end Vita and Leonard both had to push her. Her ‘separation anxiety’ was huge She wrote home every day and once, when Leonard’s letters failed to arrive, she sent a telegram asking what was wrong. Her letters were full of endearments. She longed to be reunited with her ‘daddie’.69 ‘I don’t think I could stand more than week away from you, as there are so many things to say to you, which I can’t say to Vita.’70 But she enjoyed the holiday, and so did Vita. Vita fussed over Virginia ‘like a perfect old hen’. They had separate bedrooms, and when a thunderstorm broke one night Vita went immediately to Virginia’s room to comfort her. Vita found the combination of ‘that brilliant brain and that fragile body very lovable – so independent in all mental ways, so dependent in all practical ways’.71

  Vita had by now lost sexual interest in Virginia. Initially she had been physically attracted, but it was Virginia’s mind and character that really held Vita. She saw Virginia as ‘a mental thing, a spiritual thing if you like, an intellectual thing, and she inspires a feeling of tenderness … She makes me feel protective. Also she loves me, which flatters and pleases me.’72 Vita was incapable of maintaining a passionate relationship for long. She needed the ‘buzz’ of intense involvement, and as the excitement fell away the relationship changed to one of friendship only. Most of Vita’s lovers were dependent women looking for a mother-figure. She was ‘St Anne, her Demeter, lover, mother’,73 to Mary Campbell. Margaret Voight, another lover, wrote in language Virginia would have recognised: ‘I wish I were three years old and that I could crawl into your arms and just stay there while you take on the régie of my life.’74

  Virginia, as she learnt of each new affair, poured ‘rage hot as lava’ on Vita and lectured her to change her ways.75 She scorned the ‘schoolgirl nonentities’ Vita involved herself with, but eventually she was forced to recognise that Vita was not going to change. She tried rationalising their relationship:

  the gnawing down of strata in friendship; how one passes unconsciously to different terms, takes things easier; don’t mind at all hardly about dress or anything; scarcely feel it an exciting atmosphere, which too, has its drawbacks from the ‘fizzing’ point of view: yet is saner, perhaps deeper.76

  Harold Nicolson had been posted to the embassy in Berlin in 1927 and Vita stayed with him that winter. The Woolfs planned to visit them in the New Year, but Leonard was already regretting it. He knew of Vita’s affairs, and was worried by Virginia’s erratic moods and tension. When he could not persuade Virginia to postpone the trip he insisted she warn the Nicolsons that she must have a quiet time.

  His instructions were ignored, or Virginia never passed on his message and in Berlin Leonard became increasingly angry with the Nicolsons. They in turn were irritated by Leonard’s bad temper, and his boorish refusal to attend a lunch party Harold had arranged in their honour. Virginia was embarrassed and upset by Leonard: ‘I shiver at the thought of our behaviour,’ she told Vita. ‘You and Harold were such angels.’77 She was also upset at never having Vita to herself. Only once did the two women dine alone together, and the occasion proved highly disturbing to Virginia; she questioned Vita repeatedly about her sexual involvements, and demanded proof that Vita still loved her. Vita was evasive and Virginia was not reassured.

  Two days later, on the overnight ferry home from the Hook of Holland, Virginia swallowed a large quantity of Somnifen (containing the barbiturate Veronal) given her by Vanessa against seasickness. She sank into semi-coma and Leonard could barely rouse her:

  it was with the greatest difficulty I got her into the train, as she could hardly walk and was in a kind of drugged state … The giddiness lasted off and on for about twenty-four hours.78

  Virginia maintained she took no more than the prescribed dosage, but the evidence points to an overdose; either through carelessness or perhaps as a gesture to Vita, a warning and an appeal. Leonard blamed the incident, and Virginia’s subsequent depression, on the Berlin ‘racketing’, but ignored the effect his own behaviour may have had. Vita scoffed at Leonard’s explanation; to hear him talk, she told Virginia, ‘you might have spent every night for a week till five in the morning indulging in orgies’. The real cause of the trouble, said Vita with tongue in cheek, was partly the ’flu but mainly Virginia’s ‘suppressed randiness’.79

  Virginia was laid up for six weeks, but depression was not severe and the time resting was not wasted, for it released a stream of creative thoughts; she composed The Waves ‘hour after hour’, and A Room
of One’s Own wrote itself as she lay in bed; ‘I was like a water bottle turned upside down.’80

  Virginia tried distancing herself from Vita. She would

  enter a nunnery these next months; let myself down into my mind … I am going to face certain things. It is going to be a time of adventure and attack, rather lonely and painful I think. But solitude will be good for a new book. Of course, I shall make friends. I shall be external outwardly. I shall buy some good clothes and go out into new houses.

  She inspected her life and her marriage. Her miseries were really very small ones, ‘and fundamentally’, she told herself,

  I am the happiest woman in all WC1. The happiest wife, the happiest writer; the most liked inhabitant, so I say, in Tavistock Square. When I count up my blessings, they must surely amount to more than my sorrows.81

  Virginia eventually accepted Vita’s philandering, but she could not reconcile herself to the thought of sharing Vita’s love with another woman. Of all Vita’s lovers, it was Hilda Matheson, the Director of Talks at the BBC, she loathed most. Vita tried to play down the attachment, but Virginia remained ‘worried and angry and hurt and caustic about this affair’.82

  These Hildas are a chronic case; and as this one won’t disappear and is unattached, she may be permanent. And like the damned intellectual snob that I am, I hate to be linked, even by an arm, with Hilda … A queer trait in Vita – her passion for the earnest middle-class intellectual, however drab and dreary.83

  Vita herself was withdrawing. In May 1930 she bought Sissinghurst Castle and set about restoring it and, with Harold, creating the renowned gardens. It became her permanent home after two years. Only once did Virginia stay there, when she slept in the absent Harold’s room, but she and Leonard occasionally went there for the day. Jealousy and doubts obtruded from time to time, and brought on headaches and ‘galloping horses’.