Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

by Viviane Forrester

  And who was now only a poor widower, an amorous old man, as incapable of disguising it as of accepting it: only capable of creating the libidinous space that would close with the two letters he sent to Stella after her marriage.

  An excerpt from the second letter, written three days later, to say that he had nothing to say and that he no longer wanted to divulge his feelings:

  one way or other, uttered myself rather too abundantly, if anything & must hold my tongue for a bit…. I shall probably be rather irregular, as I am afraid of not being a very cheerful correspondent. My love to———I cannot find a satisfactory name for him yet—was he ever called Waller? My dearest, I have tried to hold my tongue, as I said, though I fear that something may have peeped out. You will forgive it, I know; I wonder if I shall ever be able to write a cheerful letter. Your loving father, L.S.48

  Nothing would “peep out” before that summer morning in London during the war when, with France defeated, Virginia turned toward a father not entirely capable of holding his tongue about what was “impossible to say aloud” regarding Stella, and for which “one of the consequences was that for some time life seemed to us in a chronic state of confusion.”49

  And when in 1940 she groped about in that difficult past and tried to record what could be said aloud, what she and Vanessa could still discuss regarding the terror, frustration, and rage caused by their father, her avoidance was still so strong that she altered the dates, shifting them forward so that Stella no longer played any part in what made Leslie suspect to his daughters. Virginia begins with their indignation over Stella’s death; Stella Hills, dead three months after her marriage.

  And the whip had struck for the second time.

  Virginia writes that she and Vanessa found themselves alone, facing their father, “fully exposed without protection to the full blast of that strange character.”50 Aware that the terms “exposed” and “strange character” are loaded, she promises to explain them, but moves on to another topic without doing so.

  The weight of the words remains. Like the weight of “illicit,” which she uses to explain the violence of Leslie’s weekly rages against Vanessa when she presents him with the house accounts, for which she is responsible following Stella’s death. According to Virginia, these rages came from an “illicit51 need for sympathy, released by the woman, stimulated,” which, when refused, “stirred in him instincts of which he was unconscious. Yet also ashamed.”52

  Here, a gap!

  The violence, the seriousness of the reminiscences and the reactions prompted by Leslie do not square with their pretexts. Virginia locates the horror of those “unhappy years”53 in a minor conflict and thus hides the seriousness of the trouble caused and experienced by a man successively in love with a mother and daughter. The daughter now dead, Virginia removes her from the scene and focuses on other situations and events, involving a different sister, as the source of her own fury, indignation, and obsessive rage.

  In particular, one weekly domestic scene: each Wednesday, Vanessa, supposedly replacing the dead Stella who herself replaced the dead Julia, came to give her father the house accounts and unleashed his fury. But unlike Julia, who conspired with the cook to falsify those accounts, or Stella, who was no doubt terrified, “Nessa,” as her family called her, would not tolerate those demonstrations that, Virginia emphasizes, echoed “other words of the same kind, addressed to the sister lately dead, to her mother even.” Implacable, she remained impassive, unperturbed by her father’s anger, which further exasperated Leslie, who erupted hysterically, proclaimed himself ruined, alone, misunderstood, and, red-faced, veins bulging, worked himself up into “an extraordinary dramatisation of self pity, horror, anger,” beating his breast, roaring: “Have you no pity for me? There you stand like a block of stone,” before signing the check with a flourish, with trembling hand, and collapsing, a prostrate spectacle, while Virginia gritted her teeth, powerless and mute, stifling her “unbounded comtempt.”54

  Chauvinist, Victorian, but most of all ridiculous, these rages of Leslie Stephen are straightforward, routine, and long familiar: those of an anxious man who fanatically imagines himself on the edge of ruin. Even in Minny’s time, his conflicts with Anny Thackeray, who lived with the couple and kept the house accounts, often verged on high drama, as did their disagreement over Minny’s estate after she died. When she watched over Leslie, stricken with cancer, for the two long years of his decline, Virginia would again write: “I hope as the weakness increases he will worry less about money.”55

  Trying ordeals, indeed, those Wednesdays, but stripped of troubling innuendos, there was nothing “illicit”56 about them. They could arouse indignation, fear, outrage, but they do not correspond to the feelings of intense threat and convulsive panic Virginia records, the memory alone making her recoil, suffocated, ravaged by the horror, decades later—and less than six months before her death.

  They are a kind of memory screen: they cover another memory tied to what is “impossible to say aloud.”57 Thus diverted, the masked distress can, through other memories, emit its cry, as the complaint that escapes from Virginia Woolf more than forty years later.

  Leslie’s pretentious displays of anger, suffered by his daughter over domestic problems, ward off the memory of his more shameful behavior toward his stepdaughter. And Virginia would be able to transfer to those scenes inflicted upon Vanessa all the rage and frustration aroused by Leslie’s suspect behavior toward Stella, allowing her to remain silent, to insist, even to herself, that nothing happened, that Stella was not the object of “illicit” desires that created a “chronic state of confusion” never to be resolved.58

  The spectacular hysterics to which Vanessa was subjected provide a screen for other quieter, intensely secret scenes bordering on illegal and vastly more disturbing, pernicious and furtive, of which Stella was the object. It is very much those scenes and that “strange” father whom we discover lurking beneath Leslie Stephen’s displays of miserliness, playing the wounded patriarch, imploring the aid of his stepdaughter—“whatever its nature,” that would haunt Virginia long afterward, unbidden.59

  Let us watch her once again, searching for the right word to best express the turbulent scenes suffered by Vanessa. She crosses out the word “violent,” which is appropriate, to substitute the term “illicit,” which does not correspond, and describes the feelings aroused in her as she is writing, not by those Wednesday scenes but by the ones they screen out.60

  “Illicit”: what is forbidden by law, accomplished or attempted in an insidious way; what Leslie coveted, acknowledged to be impossible, experienced as taboo, a wild dream, but which he approached and aped to the point that the prohibition he tested threatened to appear in all its crudeness.

  With that term, linked to his “dependence on women,” and his need for them “to sympathise with him, to console him,” Virginia Woolf introduces Stella Duckworth, in pages meant to exclude and cover only the seven years after her death.61

  Thus what is silenced emerges in silence: the insidious threat of incest suffered by Stella when she was alive, which Virginia had guessed. It is that memory, unacknowledged, that produces “the horror, the recurring terror” felt by Virginia Stephen when Leslie vented his rage at Vanessa. “It was like being shut up in the same cage with a wild beast.”62

  It was not the father objecting violently to the kitchen accounts that alarmed Virginia, whose “next victim” she feared becoming, along with Vanessa, as they recalled how he had “tasked Stella’s strength, embittered her few months of joy.” No. They feared the man in love with a mother and her daughter, their half-sister, both of whom were now dead. That man forced to circumvent an “illicit” path in the lifetime of the timid, devoted Stella, and to become the humble, humiliated, deceitful creature who overshadowed the proud father of the past. The hypocritical roles that they all had to play at Hyde Park Gate. And the suspicions, the uncertainty, the silence and its cesspools: that code of silence Virginia Stephen would neve
r break. Nor would Virginia Woolf.63

  Here she is at fifty-eight years old; the war is on, Leonard has persuaded her to commit suicide with him if the Nazis invade England, and two days ago France was defeated. We know the scenario: an organ-grinder in a London square, a man selling strawberries, and Virginia, at her worktable, turns toward her father and sees herself again, fantasizes herself at fifteen, shut up in a cage with him: “He was the pacing, dangerous, morose lion; a lion who was sulky and angry and injured; and suddenly ferocious, and then very humble, and then majestic; and then lying dusty and fly pestered in a corner of the cage.” Here she is, hardly a year before her death, facing the memory of a defiled, undisciplined father, at once terrifying and discredited, stripped of prestige and threatening.64

  A father immediately defined as extremely imprudent, who “had so ignored, or disguised his own feelings that he had no idea of what he was; … he was uncivilized in his extreme unawareness. He did not realise what he did.”65

  So many substrata, so many secrets throughout the years, so many mysteries and hidden elements. Nothing is certain; everything trembles, furtive, is hidden or hardly shows, hesitates around Virginia, and it is that trembling that she must capture, that reveals the disgrace suffered by a father and the unspeakable shame of having detected him. As if it were a matter of a shameless vision, even a violation perpetrated on a parent.

  To a large extent, the most enduring difficulties arise from the coexistence of that corrupt father and the one so admired and respected, because Leslie Stephen remained intact, unscathed, pursuing his serious friendships, his life of writing and books; he forever remained the naïve, austere, honest intellectual, often full of wit, reverently surrounded by the thinkers of his day, even if he suspected himself of mediocrity.

  Leslie was also that unequivocal father, passionate about his children, faithfully sharing their daily lives, walks, sports, thoughts: the one who for a long time drew and cut out paper animal chains for them; read out loud to them at night from Tennyson, Wordsworth, Scott, Meredith, and so on; made them debate freely, form judgments, indignant if they preferred a bland hero to some more captivating villain. He was truly “in league”66 with childhood, with all his children. Up to a point: Laura was the exception.

  Even with her humiliating memories, Virginia does not forget how she always admired, how she still admires “his honesty, his unworldliness, his lovableness, his perfect sincerity,” as well as “his attractiveness … his simplicity, his integrity, his eccentricity…. He would say exactly what he thought, however inconvenient; and do what he liked.” And that was true … as a rule.67

  Most importantly, he always encouraged Vanessa and Virginia in their vocations: Vanessa in pursuing her painting classes, Virginia in immersing herself in his vast library, accompanying her in her reading, without censorship.

  How to reconcile all that with Hyde Park Gate in mourning, dominated by this same father who, at Julia’s death, had “replaced the beauty and merriment of the dead with ugliness”? How to reconcile the deception and betrayal with those “shocks of sharp pleasure” when Leslie happened to fix his “very small, very blue” eyes on her with this message: we are “in league,” the two of us. That writer and her.68

  Here begin Virginia’s experiences as the future writer, by way of the child hungry for books, which she devoured one after another, guided by the father who supplied her: “I remember his pleasure, how he stopped writing and got up and was very gentle and pleased, when I came into the study with a book I had done; and asked him for another.” There she found him, smoking his pipe, rocking in his rocking chair where he always sat to work. “Slowly he would unwrinkle his forehead and come to ground and realize with a very sweet smile that I stood there. Rising he would go to the shelves, put the book back, and ask me gently, kindly; ‘What did you make of it?’” And his daughter left the study “feeling proud and stimulated, and full of love for this unworldly, very distinguished and lonely man, whom I had pleased by coming.”69

  The young Stephens rediscovered their father’s unconventional free spirit when he showed them the way to pursue their previous life and render it even more meaningful by using their sorrow to intensify everything. “Beautiful he was at such moments; simple and eager as a child; and exquisitely alive to all affection; exquisitely tender …—but the moment passed.”70

  Nine years later, mourning Leslie, Virginia wrote to her comforter Violet Dickinson: “It was a most exquisite feeling to be with him, even to touch his hand—he was so quick, and that one finds in no one else.”71

  It was this conflict that tore her apart. Leslie was a composite, as each of us is, of so many portraits, facets, ghosts, so many various beings—or not. It is Virginia Woolf who asks, “Do we then know nobody? Only our versions of them, which as likely as not, are emanations of ourselves.”72

  Who was Leslie Stephen apart from his daughter’s memories?

  A daughter forever tortured by the ambivalence of her feelings for her father; by the repression that paralyzed her, prevented her from either blaming or reconciling with him.

  After all, Leslie Stephen faltered just once, and without overstepping the bounds. He deviated momentarily before entering a solitary old age; the hope of escaping or at least delaying it had seized him, instinctively, hope of overcoming a wife’s absence through the grace of Stella. A crisis. A crisis of aging and grief. But one that would compromise, if not Virginia’s life, at least what lay hidden there: her memory, which would henceforth become a prison, marked by a fatal wound that would not heal.

  Incest: Stephen did not physically practice it (his denunciatory letters to Stella seem to prove that), he only overtly fantasized it, verged on it with Stella Duckworth and hopefully her alone; in this sense, his daughters had nothing to fear from him. Nonetheless, the foul atmosphere of Hyde Park Gate, which had become a crypt, had penetrated its inhabitants, and it was an atmosphere of incest.

  We will not go into the question posed by Virginia in the name of one of her novel’s inhabitants: “Do I love my father sexually?” Quite a rational question, after all. But when Lytton Strachey brought her reports from the “British Sex Society’s” discussion on incest between parents and children when they were both unconscious of it, Virginia’s reaction was: “I think of becoming a member.”73

  While we are digressing, let us add, without comment, some strange signs involving a gesture with which we are already familiar.

  We will remember Leslie Stephen, arms extended, staggering out of the room where Julia had just died. In some of the most beautiful pages of To the Lighthouse, some of the most beautiful Virginia Woolf wrote, she manages to write the impossible (but an “impossible” vanquished this time): a whole section of the work is devoted solely to the house deserted by the Ramsays (“the thing that exists when we aren’t there”), throbbing with emptiness, out of time and entering the vibrant inertia of its abandonment, the rare echo of events. Someone dies at the Ramsays’. Each time, two cold lines punctuate the loss. And the first of those losses, like the others, appears in brackets: “[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]”74

  Elsewhere, in The Years, Colonel Pargiter also leaves a deathbed, but the one of a wife he does not love. He staggers out of the room, arms extended in front of him, passing his daughter Delia, who thinks: “You did that very well, Delia told him as he passed her. It was like a scene in a play.”75

  But when little Rose Pargiter, hardly more than a baby, sneaks out of the house and finds herself alone in the night, frightened, facing a man who “leered at her,” he extends his arms “as if to stop her” and she runs, takes refuge in a shop; coming back, he is still there, grimacing, and this time, we read in The Years, “he did not stretch his hands out at her; they were unbuttoning his clothes.”76

  End of parentheses. Let us leave the substrata, the u
nderground places of the unspoken, their hell. Let us return to the adolescent still filled with trepidation, crossing the London streets on her bicycle, and who does not know, will never know, that she is overwhelmingly beautiful, and who is struggling to master everyday life, to move through it day after day, determined. Resigned to continue. Disciplined.

  On the surface, the Stephens’ life unfolds courageously, energetically, in another kind of hell—the hell of monotony, a routine that Virginia nevertheless needed, revolving around a network of stable, traditional occupations, a conventional course providing a structure that could alleviate their grief and its aggressions.

  “Life goes on,” we say, even if it doesn’t exactly go on and the life of those repeating that refrain won’t either, one day.

  Down the unnerving streets of London, which she sees bristling with whinnying, kicking, rearing horses, with cars running into each other and over pedestrians, Virginia, trembling and tenacious, steers her bicycle. Through this city where she also knows familiar shops overflowing with notebooks, erasers, writing pens, gifts, consoling strawberry ices, irresistible buns, ineffable chocolates. She often walks in the parks here, especially Kensington Park, with her father or Vanessa, sometimes a brother or a half-brother, often with Stella. They go to the theater, they go skating, they visit the museums, the zoo, as a family or in pairs.

  Virginia regularly sees Dr. Seton, who regularly advises rest, milk, medications—no lessons, but rather gardening in the Hyde Park Gate courtyard, where nothing ever grows. Concerts, visits, shopping are allowed; in short, a so-called normal life.

  Virginia Stephen applies herself to living, vigilant, with conviction. Still a bit distraught. She records her way of submitting to life in a diary begun in 1897, the strange year with the promising start: Stella is engaged.