To Lytton, a card: “Ha! Ha!”93 signed by the engaged couple.
Eighteen years later, she would confide in a new friend, Ethel Smyth, a composer and conductor, eccentric, elderly, in love with her and perhaps her only true confidante: “How I hated marrying a Jew—how I hated their nasal voices, and their oriental jewellery, and their noses and their wattles—what a snob I was.” She reproaches herself for it … but not excessively! She admits that Jews of course have an “immense vitality, and I think I like that quality best of all,” but, valued or scorned, they were for her, before all else, “Jews,” defined by their ethnicity. In that same letter: “They cant die—they exist on a handful of rice and a thimble of water—their flesh dries on their bones but still they pullulate, copulate, and amass … millions of money.” That certainly had not been the case for poor Mrs. Woolf or for her children.94
Virginia is unrelenting. “I do not like the Jewish voice, I do not like the Jewish laugh,”95 she writes in her diary three years after her marriage, regarding her sister-in-law Flora. To the point that her visceral hatred leads to hysteria, nervous attacks, and delirium, brought on by her frantic, almost superstitious physiological horror, gone entirely unexamined?
Leonard? For her, he was an exceptional Jew, hardly labeled, hardly exotic. Labeled all the same by his circle, in that refined environment famous for its progressive ideas, its open-mindedness and free morals. Intellectuals who would be horrified by Hitler’s rise, and wouldn’t realize the extent to which they and their kind throughout the world had cleared the way for him.
Harry Davis, provocative and wild, beside himself, at the end of his rope, screamed: “I’m a Jew, I tell you—I’m a Jew!”96 Leonard protected himself, silent, “nothing matters” having become his motto. In his last interviews he liked to claim that he had never suffered or even encountered discrimination. Maybe he did not suffer any longer, once the Harry Davis in him had been killed.
In 1939, Virginia notes that Leonard told her he had trained himself to completely avoid all personal feeling.
Did he feel anything the day of their marriage? He records the sober celebration in just a few lines, with no mention of Virginia. What did he remember of it? The registrar’s office opened onto a cemetery. Standing facing the windows, he had looked at the tombstones and thought of the expression: “Till death do us part,” not included in the civil ceremony. That’s all, except for the moment of comic relief: Vanessa (in true Stephenesque style) had interrupted the service: how was she to officially change the name of her son Claudian to Quentin? “One thing at a time,”97 had been the answer.
But what Leonard does not mention: his mother was not invited, nor anyone else from his family. Only a dozen close friends … of Virginia.
He would be careful not to mention it in his very adaptable memoirs.
Conjuring away a suppression, an insult, an offense. Accepting them.
If her son passes over the event in silence, if Quentin Bell feigns surprise and assumes this absence had something to do with the wedding date, a letter has been published addressed to Leonard from Marie Woolf, written three days before the marriage; he must have informed her that she was not invited.
My dear Len … To be quite frank, yes, it has hurt me extremely that you did not make it a point of having me at your marriage. I know full well that neither Virginia nor you had the least desire to slight me, why should you, but it has been a slight all the same. You are the first of my sons who marries, it is one of the if not the most important day of your life. It would have compensated me for the very great hardships I have endured in bringing you all up by myself, if you had expressed the desire that you wished me before anyone else, to be witness to your happiness…. It has been the custom from time immemorial that one’s nearest relatives are paid the compliment of being invited to the marriage ceremony; to ignore that custom & to carry it so far as to leave out one’s Parent, must strike one as an unheard of slight. A wedding entertainment no one asked for, you’re wise in discarding it. However, I will not say more; you have missed a great opportunity of giving me some happy moments—I have not had many lately! With very much love.98
Leonard had let himself be castrated.
All his life he would keep quiet in that way. But all his life he would respond to it, unrelentingly, unconsciously, after the fact.
Instinctively, he would restore the balance, without saying as much. He was “Jewish”? Labeled as such? Declared marginal? Then Virginia would be declared “mad.” Each of them marginal and a step away from disgrace. He would suffer in silence. She would struggle. Their captivating, harmonious life, filled with work, with plans, abundant with warm friendships, perennial gardens, cozy rooms, public recognition, would be undermined on both sides by resentment.
A silent one.
And first, the question of children. Forbidden.
Virginia hoped for them, was sure of having them. “My baby shall sleep in the cradle,”99 she wrote confidently to her friend Violet Dickinson, who offered her one in an anticipatory gesture. She was pleased with her new home, with its lawn where her “brats” could play.
But they did not.
A few months after their marriage, alone and without informing his wife, Leonard consults several doctors: isn’t it dangerous for Virginia to have a child?
The pretext: she suffers from insomnia, headaches … no doubt largely the effects of unexpressed disappointment and feelings of loss over the marriage that now holds her captive, the paths that have closed to her. “Marriage,” she would confide later to Ethel Smyth, “what about marriage? I married Leonard Woolf in 1912, I think, and almost immediately was ill for 3 years.”100
But Leonard insists, clandestinely: isn’t it dangerous for her to have a child? Sir George Savage, Virginia’s doctor, considers, on the contrary, that it would do her “a world of good, my dear fellow, do her a world of good!” Leonard promptly dismisses him as a mere socialite and seeks the opinions of many other doctors, whom he always visits alone and none of whom has ever met Virginia. Some of them confirm Leonard’s fears. He also consults Jean Thomas, director of the rest home where Virginia stayed, and whose conclusions—conveyed by Woolf and conforming to his own—surprise Vanessa: “I am rather surprised at your account of Jean’s opinion, for she certainly told me the opposite. Why has she changed? I hope you will get something definite from Savage. After all he does know Virginia and ought really to be the best judge. I suppose Craig can’t tell as much without having seen her or knowing her at all.” But Savage’s opinion is not taken into account. Woolf considers all the other diagnoses, Thomas’s among them, to support his view. “They confirmed my fears and were strongly against her having children. We followed their advice.” We! He would say no more about it. The question was settled. Or rather the edict.101
Without the least participation of his wife, who never saw a single one of those doctors, who was completely ignorant of those consultations, without the slightest discussion, the briefest exchange with her, the decision is made. Leonard imposes it upon Virginia: she will not have children. But “We followed …”
For her, a bell tolls. A verdict. An affront. A new loss, to which she would not be resigned.
The status of mother denied her, which she immediately sublimates, in which she locates her deficiencies, defeat, guilt, failure. It would represent a major verdict toward denying her “normality.”
Aside from the warmth, love, the tenderness, sensuality, and intimacy associated with maternity, to participate in it would be to merge with that “normality” radically called into question here. All her life, Virginia’s encounters with children proved delightful, a joy for both parties. Quentin Bell beamed as he recalled them during our interview session: “I have marvelous childhood memories of her. She took part in our games; she had an imagination that helped her to share our joys and our own imaginations. When she arrived, it was a delight. Virginia is coming today, what fun! She was charming with children.”102 But
all her life, she reeled under their inflicted absence.
“Oh, dearest Gwen,” she wrote to the wife of Jacques Raverat, a French painter who was very close to death, “To think of you is making me cry—why should you and Jacques have had to go through this? … I was going to have written to Jacques about his children, and about my having none—I mean, these efforts of mine to communicate with people are partly childlessness, and the horror that sometimes overcomes me.” She is often angry at herself for not having made Leonard defy the doctors: “My own fault too—a little more self control on my part, & we might have had a boy of 12, a girl of 10: This always makes me wretched in the early hours.”103
Later, in Mrs. Dalloway, she would take it out on the omnipotent Dr. Bradshaw, responsible for the suicide of his patient Septimus Warren Smith: “Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalized despair.”104
Infertility would not have bothered her so much, so often devastated her, or plunged her into so painful and recurrent despair. But to find herself forbidden motherhood by her partner, to have consented to it, to prove powerless before this edict that denied her mental health. A disaster. A violent aggression, a debilitating blow.
A sentence. A sanction. She would submit to it without a fight, it seems, no doubt taking the pretext for proof. She was also too humiliated. Too weighed down with her past and blaming herself, repressing her distress. At the time of the verdict, she does not mention it in her diary, much less in her letters. She would be close to tears when, at the height of her fame, she joked with Vanessa over the recent success of her paintings: “Indeed, I am amazed, a little alarmed (for as you have children, the fame by rights belongs to me).”105
But a strange symptom affected her whole circle (and their descendants): throughout the long, grave crisis that almost immediately followed Leonard’s announcement of his decision, and during the subsequent, almost successful suicide attempt, no one, much less Leonard, considered that such a loss, such a dictate, such a shock might be the cause of those episodes.
The cause? Never was it found! Virginia was “mad,” that’s all. She would never experience another crisis like that over the twenty-five years she had still to live? That was the anomaly, no doubt!
This blind spot regarding the obvious reasons for Virginia’s collapse (there are others as well) would support Leonard’s theory, adopted by Quentin Bell, of a groundless, purely physiological insanity. And everyone around her would seem astounded to witness Virginia, beside herself, violent, held by hired nurses, screaming her hatred for Leonard for days on end, refusing to let him come near her for weeks. Her outbursts were considered sheer raving, aimed at such a poor, patient, and devoted husband. Such childishness!
Forbidden children? No one except Virginia would consider the matter further, except to assume it was settled and for the best. “In this I imagine that Leonard was right,” Quentin would write in the biography of his aunt. “It is hard to imagine Virginia as a mother.”106 The subject was closed.
Anyway, children, what for? Her books would take their place.
Leonard and then Quentin resort to the classic clichés of books having been given birth, and being taken care of, protected as offspring. Leonard’s version: “As with so many serious writers, her books were to her part of herself and felt to be part of herself somewhat in the same way as a mother often seems all her life to feel that her child remains still part of herself.” And further on, “The mother wants the child to be perfect for its own sake, and Virginia, whose attitude towards her books was, as with so many serious writers, maternal, wanted her books to be perfect for their own sake.”107
So, why have children with him? She could produce them all by herself!
Of course, those children, those novels, conferred upon her a measure of fame that the ones he had renounced may have offered Leonard, but he expresses no regret, not the slightest bitterness, regarding the work that he would not write. His output of essays and communications would be prolific; his life was fulfilling, and he led it with energy, conviction, success, as publisher (with Virginia), as man of politics, essayist, historian, and … skilled gardener. He would become his wife’s passionate publisher and the first and only reader of her manuscripts (but only once finished): their trustworthy and feared judge, whose good opinion was never assumed but nearly always won. He would very naturally merge with her, expertly and perfectly in sync with the domains of Virginia that had remained his, even as he practiced other ones.
Nevertheless, she is the one who achieves the success, the destiny that he had wanted and anticipated to be his, and Lytton Strachey’s, when he was young, just as possessed, and perhaps just as talented as she was. Must we see, here again, the balance of the marriage restored, a compensation for the dissymmetry? No novel for him, no children for her, except those novels that she can produce without him?
In any case, obstacles, inhibitions, affronts on every side!
“We’ve had such rows with poor old Mother Wolf, who says she never imagined such a slight as not being asked to the wedding,”108 writes Virginia to Duncan Grant, who was invited.
Is it nonsense to compare the slight suffered by Marie Woolf, supplanted mother, to the one suffered by Virginia Woolf, deprived of becoming a mother—thus supplanted as well?
For what accounts for Leonard’s stubborn resistance to the idea of fatherhood and especially of fathering Virginia’s child? The broader answer lies in his letters from Ceylon, in the rejection, discouragement, and pessimism of that not-so-distant time.
But there is also another answer, for which evidence exists: how to reconcile the idea of descendants, who would be Leonard’s mother’s descendants as well, with Virginia’s visceral contempt for her mother-in-law and her line? Here is Virginia complaining in a letter, “9 Jews, all of whom, with the single exception of Leonard, might well have been drowned without the world wagging one ounce the worse.”109 How could Leonard reconcile the presence of a child with the arrogant rejection of his origins by its future mother?
A letter from Clive Bell serves as proof. Most revealing, it demonstrates the distressing but inescapable consequences of such a situation within this social circle, and the subtle but palpable atmosphere Leonard lived in. Timorous as Leonard was, he was pushing the limits here, but he ignored that his future brother-in-law Clive would confirm as much. Clive, a few days before the couple’s official engagement, writing to Molly McCarthy, with whom he had a brief affair in May 1912: “Virginia and the Woolf have come to some pretty definite understanding…. It is really very satisfactory, I suppose; but it would be rather horrible to think that, most probably, people would feel for one’s children what none of us can help feeling for Jews.—Oh he’s quite a good fellow—he’s a Jew you know—. Don’t you think it would be rather painful to get oneself into that plight? And Woolf’s family are chosen beyond anything.”110
Need we say more?
Again it is the dashing Clive who writes to his mistress Mary Hutchinson three years later: “I wonder why the Jews instituted the rite of circumcision [sic]. Was there money in it, d’you think, as there is in lambs’ tails? Did the Levites traffick in prepuces?”111
No comment.
Thus, within a web of increasingly complex factors, for Leonard, it might have been less a matter of revenge than of an impasse, facing up by giving up.
A precision: nothing is innocuous here. There is no hierarchy in ostracism. The anti-Semitism of the salon weighs as heavily as any other, even the worst kind, to which it is prelude. It is already criminal precisely because it reveals the calm conviction, the acquiescence of those considered eminent. Their acquiescence to discrimination, to hatred of Jews, constitutes their support of the principles upon which Nazism and its European offshoots would be founded.
Mockery, shallow complicity, unexamined prejudices establish a complicit norm and authorize racism, or even worse, make it out to be harmless. Whereas the sli
ghtest word uttered in this context, the lack of respect, the self-granted supremacy, the arbitrary, narcissistic, and paranoid contempt are auxiliaries to the crimes that may follow, that they have guaranteed. Barbarity also took root in the Bloomsbury salons and their ilk, all precursors of the reign of the arbitrary that spawned such crimes.
The concentration camps, the gas chambers, the deportation trains, the manhunts, the negation of the living among the living did not suddenly spring up out of nowhere. Neither does any tyranny. They emerged first from the same anecdotes that targeted Leonard Woolf, the atavistic manias of Virginia, the presumptuous jokes and self-importance of their friends, their self-satisfied complicity, their certainty of being right … because they were certain of being so. They authorized the fundamental principle underlying the horror: permissiveness. Arbitrary scorn.
For Virginia, this was a poison, a vital, most inward factor in her self-destruction.
Another precision: such anti-Semitism had nothing to do with religion. On the Woolf side, the family still vaguely maintained certain practices around Marie. But when the nine brothers and sisters married, none of them married anyone of Jewish origin. If, as a child, Leonard had learned to sing in Hebrew, he had also rejected all religious faith. Devoted to politics and philosophy, he would remain steadfastly agnostic.
On the Stephen side, absolute agnosticism. Virginia’s father, Leslie, at one time an ordained pastor of the Anglican Church, had lost his faith, renounced it, and so became a lifelong agnostic … as did Julia, his second wife and Virginia’s mother, who had lost her faith for good upon the death of her first husband and who was first attracted to Stephen, by then an eminent man of letters, because of his essay on the history of free thinking. Virginia? She was agnostic as well.
What we are confronting here is a matter of “race.”
Of course, this anti-Semitism contradicts Virginia’s antifascist impulses and militancy, but she is not alone in revealing such contradictions. Although it is particularly surprising in her, gifted as she was with a political sensibility unencumbered with received ideologies. Witness Three Guineas, an ardent, thoughtful essay firmly opposed to any obedience to fanatic creeds. Which denounces hatred of the Jews.
Virginia Woolf: A Portrait Page 6
