Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

by Viviane Forrester

  Leonard had just embarked, equipped with ninety volumes of Voltaire’s works. Responding to Lytton’s protest would sustain him through six long years of trials: he would pour out his feelings without restraint to his friend in letters that show him tormented, demeaned, shattered in the midst of frantic activity; overwhelmed with work, garnering local successes and promotions, but lost, suffocating outside the circle of his Cambridge friends and struggling, often filled with impotent anger: “You think I shall be in a position to forgive God one day?”12

  Cornered.

  And why not stuck in this trap forever? To Lytton: “I feel that, in a way, you are lost to me already; you at any rate will be here, & there are other people, but I shall be rotting in Ceylon. I shall be out of date after 6 years.” He knew nothing now but regret, longing, nostalgia: “It was always one of our supremacies—our poor dead blighted supremacies—that we could laugh. I think too I can remember them all; how we laughed [at Cambridge] for hours in that dingy old attic of mine & in the Goth’s13 green room & Turner’s yellow barn, in your rooms & the cloisters & all over Richmond Park. I haven’t laughed like that since Nov 19th though I was hysterical often on the Syria, & I suppose I shan’t again for 6 years, when I expect I at any rate shall be dried up.” The disorientation persists, the uprootedness, the sensation of a waking nightmare: “You can’t exist, nor grey old Cambridge, nor Bob Trevy nor the Yen. I can’t believe I have ever spoken to you, or rather I shouldn’t if I did not want to so much now.”14

  The idea of a definitive return faded. Foundering, Leonard anticipated a life of constraints, engulfed in a destiny he abhorred. He envisioned himself incapable of ever escaping, suffocated by financial need, lacking qualifications, in a kind of social paralysis that isolated him where he loathed to be: “One thing you must understand & that is that I am done for as regards England. I shall live & die in these appalling countries now. If I come back for good now I should do nothing but loaf until I died of starvation. What else could I do? And as for happiness—I don’t believe in being happy even in England.”15

  Throughout the six years he lived in Ceylon, his letters reflect him actively depressed, overwhelmed with discouragement. Three years before he returned to London on leave, Lytton suggested an escape to him: marry Virginia Stephen. Leonard, who was very close to Thoby Stephen at Cambridge, had only met his two sisters, Virginia and Vanessa, twice, over tea and at a farewell dinner. He immediately latched onto the idea, but not without concluding: “To think of existence at all fills me with horror & sickness; the utter foulness, the stupid blind vindictive foulness of everything & of myself.”16

  This is the man, the man of Ceylon, who, returning to London three years later, would marry Virginia. And this is the man of Ceylon, as we know him, as none (except Lytton) knew him, who would forever claim ignorance regarding all notions of neurosis, neurasthenia, depression or melancholia, any personal thoughts of suicide.

  But it is he, the socialist Jew, who in 1940 would propose that he and Virginia, also on Hitler’s blacklist, should asphyxiate themselves if the Nazis landed. And it is he whose suicidal tendencies, melancholia, neurasthenia, and neurosis run as a leitmotif through the letters he wrote from Ceylon, confiding to Lytton: “I sometimes wonder whether I shall commit suicide before the six years are up & I can see you again; at this moment I feel as near as I have ever been. Depression is becoming, I believe, a mania with me, it sweeps upon & over me every eight or ten days, deeper each time. If you hear that I have died of sunstroke, you may be the only person to know that I have chosen that method of annihilation.” And again: “Damn damn damn damn damn I took out my gun the other night, made my will & prepared to shoot myself. God knows why I didn’t; merely I suppose the imbecility of weakness & the futility of ridiculous hopes. Whores & vulgar gramophones, fools & wrecked intellects. Why am I caged & penned & herded with these. I laugh when I read that San Francisco is wiped out & weep over the wreck & ruin of my existence.”17

  Strangely enough, that is where Leonard’s strength resides: in the power of his tragic ardor, as later, in the energy, the endless energy required to keep from expressing it, to hold that ardor in check to ensure his decisive status, never again to find himself an outcast, forever to be respected above all (even if it meant being cowardly sometimes in order to maintain this; even if it meant feigning ignorance of the anti-Semitism to which he was often openly subjected, even among his close friends).

  Only his correspondence with Strachey still tied him to the Apostles, to the life that was running its distant course among his friends. Lytton remains passionately faithful to him and finds his letters “Wonderful…. Why are you a man? We are females, nous autres, but your mind is singularly male.”18

  Lytton’s writing is more brilliant, more spirited than Woolf’s. He overflows with dynamism, ambition, humor, and beneath his light dandy-intellectual façade, he reveals a keen capacity for observation and lucid sensitivity toward his friends. A boundless enthusiasm—this was written in 1904, when he was twenty-four years old: “We are greater than our fathers; we are greater than Shelley; we are greater than the Eighteenth Century; we are greater than the Renaissance; we are greater than the Romans and the Greeks. What is hidden from us? We have mastered all. We have abolished religion, we have founded ethics, we have established philosophy, we have sown our strange illuminations in every province of thought, we have conquered art, we have liberated love.”19 Up until then, they had only good intentions!

  Strachey’s only difficulties come precisely from his love affairs, among them his rivalry with Maynard Keynes over the irresistible young painter Duncan Grant, before the latter became the lover of Adrian, the younger brother of Virginia. Who, in their eyes, was only the sister of her other brother, Thoby, so revered at Cambridge. “Oh but the Goth! Don’t you see that if God had to justify the existence of the World it would be done if he could produce the Goth?” exclaims Lytton, who, less than a year after Leonard’s departure, would have tea with “the Gothic at home” and this time would find Virginia “rather wonderful—quite witty, full of things to say, and absolutely out of rapport with reality.”20

  Lytton and Leonard had in common their desire to become and knowledge of being writers. Lytton was already imagining readers for their correspondence. And a publisher. Which also explains his flair. But it is Leonard who reveals himself to the fullest, as he is, hyperactive and broken. Devastated. Something died in him then, for good.

  Although, if he considered himself a banished, mortified failure in Ceylon, foundering in dereliction, he held sway in the villages there, in the ever increasing regions that fell within his jurisdiction. People bowed down to him. There he dealt with, directed, judged men (natives) destabilized by a triumphant order that was foreign to them, managed by a civilization that was not their own.

  Leonard slipped easily into the colonialist role. He was restive only with regard to his own fate, so different from his expectations, falling so far short of his hopes. It is true that the Empire was taken for granted at that time, that colonialism was everywhere accepted, even among those who tended, as he did, toward what would become the British Labour party.

  Nearly sixty years later, in his autobiography, he would mention some qualms, a growing uneasiness he felt in Jaffna; a belated awareness of the imperialism that ruled and his own role in it as proconsul. His letters hardly mention it. Nor the reprimands of his superiors, however disinclined they were to condemn their administrators for applying too stringent measures with too zealous rigidity—as they would do themselves.

  To be fair—and his first novel, The Village in the Jungle, testifies to this—he was dazzled by the landscape and moved by its inhabitants, whom he preferred to the unthinkable vulgarity of his colleagues. He learned Tamil and Sinhalese. Nonetheless, he was a White Man, civilized, triumphant, brutal: “The Arabs [!] will do anything if you hit them hard enough with a walking stick, an occupation in which I have been engaged for the most part of the last
3 days & nights.”21

  In each of his posts, he assumed multiple responsibilities: secretary, accountant, administrator, police officer, judge, tax collector, even veterinarian: didn’t he inspect the herds? He inspected … everything everywhere in the ever vaster territories for which he was responsible. He endlessly made the rounds, grand tours in old vehicles, on horseback, on bicycle, grappling with malaria and other diseases; the insects swarmed, the climate was unbearable, his colleagues insipid. The work (an average of sixteen hours a day) became an antidote: “I work, God, how I work. I have reduced it to a method & exalted it to a mania.”22 That would be true, and could be the motto, for his whole life.

  One of his responsibilities was to attend hangings; he even had to give the signal for them:

  I had to go (as Fiscal) to see four men hanged one morning. They were hanged two by two. I have a strong stomach but at best it is a horrible performance. I go to the cells & read over the warrant of execution & ask them whether they have anything to say. They nearly always say no…. I have (in Kandy) to stand on a sort of verandah where I can actually see the man hanged. The signal has to be given by me. The first two were hanged all right but they gave one of the second too big a drop or something went wrong. The man’s head was practically torn from his body & there was a great jet of blood which went up about 3 or 4 feet high, covering the gallows & priest who stands praying on the steps…. I don’t know why I have written all this to you except that whenever I stand waiting for the moment to give the signal, you & Turner & the room at Trinity come to mind & the discussion in which Turner enraged us so by saying that he would not turn his head if anyone said there was a heap of corpses in the corner by the gyproom [college servants’ pantry]. I don’t think I should any more.23

  In fact, he adapted and the “appalling spectacle” soon became part of the routine:

  My only news is that I had to shoot my dog yesterday & that I had to be present at an execution on Friday. It was really more unpleasant shooting the dog than hanging the man…. The man himself did not care at all. He walked up the scaffold smiling. I heard the priest say to him on the scaffold, when he was waiting with the handkerchief over his face & the noose round his neck, “Are you frightened?” & the man answered in the most casual of tones, “Not a bit.”24

  Upon his return, Leonard would be able to exploit these stories of tortures and the role he played in them. From their first meeting, Adrian, Virginia’s younger brother, would remember especially that his “descriptions of hangings were very interesting.”25

  “He has ruled India, hung black men, and shot tigers,” Virginia would write her friends a few years later, perhaps to compensate for the announcement (the “confession,” she would call it) of her engagement to “a penniless Jew.”26

  Colonialism! It went without saying among the Europeans, particularly the British, in all circles, whatever the political or emotional sensibilities of its protagonists or witnesses. Fundamentally, racism. Unconscious, insofar as it was then considered natural, obvious to the point of going unnoticed, much less judged. And isn’t that still the case? So many present-day forms of reprehensible, even criminal ostracism will be recognized in retrospect.

  One more remark: there is no question of idealizing anyone here, much less Virginia. To conceal or temper the known facts would mean sacrificing accuracy, acquiescing to a concern for appeal. It would mean despising Virginia Woolf to present her other than she was in order to preserve her memory.

  But one thing is unassailable: her work. A body of work does not require its author to be an ideal or even a decent human being: only a person for whom life is not sufficient as is. It is not incumbent upon this person to offer the reader a gratifying reflection, a model or an example, but, among other things, she must endure her own self and somehow extract something from reality. However sublime, the work of a writer grows from composite, sometimes unpleasant (a euphemism) ground, and does not aim at the sublime, but at the least accessible, most reticent thing: accuracy. And the miracle of its creation often derives from its link with the general turmoil, indeed even its deep roots in failure, decay, or worse….

  And then no life offers a clear outline. We lack the words and expressions for capturing what animates, what circulates, multiple and inaccessible, within each of us in our “moments of being.” And we each live only within ourselves: whether conflicted or extroverted, devoted to others, we can only inhabit ourselves, live within the first person throughout the fits and starts, the ups and downs of our journey.

  “Even in the wickedest man there’s a poor innocent horse toiling away, with a heart, a liver, and arteries in which there’s no malice, and which suffer.”27 In the words of Marcel Proust.

  But let us return to Leonard, who would rather become a man who no longer suffers, and who would soon put on his impassive, legendary mask.

  Return to Leonard and Virginia? To their marriage? We aren’t there yet. And neither is Leonard. Until the time of his engagement, what was his relationship to women, to desire, to sex, to being in love?

  Still back in England, he believed Lytton had fallen in love with a woman—but no, he realized, because, with regard to a woman, “you could not be or at any rate would not—with women. I never am either with any individual of the species—yet—except perhaps for a moment with some face or form—only it is more than that—that I see in a carriage or a bus or gutter. But at any rate I know I have the ability if not the inclination.”28 An inclination that would not develop in Ceylon—but rather a growing repulsion, almost a hostility toward women and especially their bodies.

  Nevertheless, it was in Ceylon that he experienced his first sexual relations. 1905. He was twenty-five years old. A prostitute, of mixed blood. A night of “degraded debauch…. The ridiculousness of existence never reaches such heights—the elaborate absurdity made me almost impuissant from amusement.” In Ceylon, he would have sexual relations with prostitutes and would experience them with a kind of horror and fascinated guilt, in denial of “these degradations—their lasciviousness or their ugliness.”29

  In that narrow colonial environment where everyone watched everyone else, it was difficult, it is true, to maintain a personal life, but Leonard considered all female proximity, no matter how chaste, as sordid. He happened to confide to Lytton that “among other things,” he had fallen in love with a young girl in his circle, whom, as a gentleman, he had to respect (lacking intentions of marriage), thus congratulating himself for acting as though there was nothing between them and deploring what was “none the less unpleasant & filthy. I am beginning to think it is always degraded being in love.” “Degraded” is a term he often pairs with “in love.” In his poems, lovers exchange a “cancerous kiss,” and a woman doesn’t recognize a “dead man’s lips,” unaware that she has kissed a corpse.30

  Let us not forget that he would marry Virginia Stephen immediately upon his return to London. It is this lover who would become her partner. The one who in 1907, five years earlier, related how, at the classic invitation from a man (“Would you like a woman?”), he entered a house to find himself face to face with “a half naked woman sitting on a bed. But I was too utterly bored really to feel even the mild disgust which was my only feeling (if there was any). I just sat down on a chair dumb with dejection & finally, without doing or saying anything, gave her all the money I had on me & fled.” It is this lover who declared, three years before marrying Virginia: “Most women naked when alive are extraordinarily ugly, but dead they are repulsive.”31

  Upon his return to London, did he suddenly fall in love with Virginia, to the point of being transformed into that man so often portrayed as a skilled, duped lover, who would selflessly sacrifice his passion for women, his ardent sexuality, for an utterly inhibited wife?

  Hardly! That widely accepted version, whispered discreetly during Virginia’s lifetime (she accepted it), repeated decades later by Leonard in his autobiography, is decidedly false. First of all, their meeting had noth
ing to do with chance. It was a matter of two trapped beings, each of whom appeared to the other as a last resort.

  Virginia, so firmly rooted in the social set that enthralled him, represented the solution for Leonard, who dreamed of leaving Ceylon and reentering, for good this time, the only environment in which he could breathe.

  And Leonard, a man of quality, unencumbered, could save Virginia from the dreaded label of “old maid.” “No one has asked me to marry them,” she wrote in 1908, when she was twenty-six years old. Virginia, despite her beauty, was hardly sought-after; without a partner and the status of a married woman, her solitude was a burden to her. A Virginia full of yearning, prey to long, silent grieving due to those wounds of the past that we will soon meet.32

  At thirty years old, Virginia Stephen, who was, in fact, truly supreme, had had two vague, belated proposals, and only one serious one. From Hilton Young, who took quite some time to declare himself and whom, in the end, she turned down. Through the many letters exchanged with her sister, Vanessa, we can follow their anxious, often vain hopes for rendezvous with potential, yet fleeting suitors. “Am I to have no proposal then? If I had had the chance, and determined against it, I could settle to virginity with greater composure than I can, when my womanhood is at question.” Vacationing in Somerset, she worries about Hilton Young: “I have heard nothing from H.Y. [Hilton Young]: and it strikes me that I probably led him to think that I should be here till Saturday week…. I may have been too cold, or too hot, or he may have thought better of it. Anyhow, my chance of a proposal dwindles.” He is the only one (apart from Leonard) to actually declare himself—and she would refuse him.33

  The two other proposals? One from a man already married, Sydney Waterlow; the other from the pusillanimous Walter Lamb, who asked her to wait and could not make up his mind. “Marriage is so difficult. Will you let me wait? Don’t hurry me.” And she: “What am I to do! Am I such a d——d failure. We talked for two hours.”34