Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

by Viviane Forrester

  At first disappointing, stiff, he warms up and soon impresses and charms Virginia: “But what about Eliot? Will he become ‘Tom’? What happens with friendships undertaken at the age of 40?” Leonard elaborates: “When we first got to know Tom, we liked him very much, but we were both a little afraid of him.” Once or twice, Virginia will allude to what might have happened if … and will wonder what effect lipstick might have on the imperturbable Tom.24

  Who, over time, will become increasingly more puritan, more strictly religious. And Virginia will describe him as “behaving … like an infuriated hen, or an old maid who has been kissed by the butler.” Politically? It was hearing him eulogize Mussolini that led Vivienne, in order to win him back, to join a league of fascists! He is anti-Semitic (to the extreme) and Leonard will defend him on this point after World War II. Sarah recites an excerpt from The Waste Land in The Years, when she rails against the city upon the arrival of her neighbor Abrahamson: “‘Polluted city, unbelieving city, city of dead fish and worn-out frying pans.’”25

  With or without the Bloomsbury stamp, a number of men and women who surrounded Virginia, and whose lives can be followed with hers year after year, sometimes remained unknown, as, for example, Saxon Sydney-Turner, an Apostle and great friend of Thoby and Leonard at Cambridge. Turner, as mad about opera as he was weak in character, a musician who never tried to accomplish anything. Defeated by life and delighted by that. A member of the circle who had once accompanied Adrian and his sister to Bayreuth and who was in love with Barbara Hiles, as was his friend and rival, Nicholas Begenal. For a long time, the young woman wavers; the two men are in anguish, especially Saxon.

  Her decision? We learn it with Vanessa, from Virginia, who writes to her in 1918, with bombing nearby: “Dearest, I now begin another letter, partly that should I die tonight you may know my last thoughts were of you. Not that you care—but think of all the gossip you’d miss—yes, that touches one sensitive spot. My chief item—Barbara—is stale by this time. I daresay you’ve written her an expressive letter in your best style. She burst in this morning saying she was going to be married on Friday. With consummate presence of mind I exclaimed ‘Then you’ve chosen the right man!’ I hadn’t the least notion which. She said, ‘Yes, its Nick.’ So I said ‘Of course Nick’s the right man,’ and she said, ‘Yes, he’s the right man to marry, but Saxon is very wonderful as a friend. And it’s not going to make the least difference to any of us. We’ve all discussed it, and we’re agreed, and we’re going to Tidmarsh [Lytton Strachey’s house at the time] for the honeymoon, and Carrington and Lytton’ll be there—which makes it all the nicer.’ I cant say I altogether understand the young; I’m not sure, I mean that I dont see a reversion to the devoted submissions of our grandmothers,” Virginia ends, perplexed.26

  But this marriage would make a difference: Saxon will not be content to accompany Barbara Bagenal for the rest of his life, humble and resigned, or her marriage and her children.

  Barbara, whom Virginia accuses Nessa of leading astray: “Theres Barbara, condemned by you to have three children and decorate her house; and now—all thanks to you and Duncan—the poor woman has moved into a caravan, where she sits all day on the ladder, shelling peas. Somehow she thinks this is in the Bloomsbury manner.”27

  But Virginia has always guessed at the hidden distress of the timid Saxon and endlessly endeavors, without him detecting it (as with Jacques Raverat) to cheer and comfort him, to assure him of an admiration based solely on his former promise, before he had so willingly renounced it.

  On the other hand (with the exception of Eliot—if he is part of it), Bloomsbury remains impenetrable to Virginia’s peers, who are not, whatever their virtues, the likes of Forster or Strachey. First and foremost, James Joyce comes to mind. Also, less unequivocally, T. E. and D. H. Lawrence, and also the giant Ludwig Wittgenstein, who lives nearby and often crosses paths with the Woolfs at Cambridge, but is hardly mentioned.

  Joyce? Between them, a single messenger, Miss Weaver, appears in the Woolfs’ life, carrying a heavy brown package, the manuscript of Ulysses. It is Tom Eliot who sends them both Miss Weaver and the manuscript: could the Hogarth Press publish this text rejected for “indecency” by all the publishers, and especially by the printers, whom English law punishes just as severely as the publishing houses when forbidden books appear?28

  Miss Weaver, editor of the Egoist, the avant-garde review for which Ezra Pound is editor-in-chief, is devoted to the work of Joyce, for whom she is a patron; she has published Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a series in her journal (and as a book at her own expense).

  April 18, 1918, the Woolfs curiously await this audacious and subversive woman. Alas: “almost instantly Harriet Weaver appeared. Here our predictions were entirely at fault. I did my best to make her reveal herself, in spite of her appearance, all that the Editress of the Egoist ought to be, but she remained inalterably modest judicious & decorous. Her neat mauve suit fitted both soul & body.” When she left, Leonard put the manuscript, that “piece of dynamite,” in a desk drawer in the sitting room.29

  According to her version, they read the manuscript and decided to publish it on the condition that they could find a printer who would agree to take charge of the printing. None did, but it was clearly not so simple. A letter from Virginia to Lytton reveals her first (and decisive) reaction: “We’ve been asked to print Mr Joyce’s new novel, every printer in London and most in the provinces having refused. First there’s a dog that p’s—then there’s a man that forths, and one can be monotonous even on that subject—moreover, I don’t believe that his method, which is highly developed, means much more than cutting out the explanations and putting in the thoughts between dashes. So I don’t think we shall do it.”30 A few months later the manuscript is returned to Miss Weaver with a letter of regret.

  It’s true that Hogarth had only been in existence then for two years, and with scant resources, as we know. It’s surprising that a project of such scope could have been considered at all.

  Thus, no encounter of any kind, but at Joyce’s death, two months before her own, Virginia, stunned, remembers (and forgets): “Then Joyce is dead—Joyce about a fortnight younger than I am. I remember Miss Weaver, in wool gloves, bringing Ulysses in type script to our tea table at Hogarth House. Roger [Fry] I think sent her [it was really Tom Eliot]. Would we devote our lives to printing it? The indecent pages looked so incongruous: she was spinsterly, buttoned up. And the pages reeled with indecency. I put it in the desk drawer of the inlaid cabinet. One day Katherine Mansfield came, & I had it out. She began to read, ridiculing: then suddenly said, But theres some thing in this: a scene that should figure, I suppose in the history of literature…. He [Joyce] was about the place, but I never saw him. Then I remember Tom [Eliot] in Ottoline [Morrell]’s room at Garsington saying—it was published then—how can anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter? He was for the first time in my knowledge, rapt, enthusiastic. I bought the blue paper book, & then read it here one summer I think with spasms of wonder, of discovery, & then again with long lapses of intense boredom…. That goes back to a pre-historic world. And now all the gents are furbishing up opinions, & the books, I suppose, take their place in the long procession.”31 As following his death, those of Bergotte, in Proust—which she read.

  Virginia Woolf’s sadness thinking of James Joyce’s death, so shortly before her own: the only element, along with their demon, writing, that brought them together.

  But this testimonial reveals that she actually only read Ulysses after it was already published, never in its entirety in manuscript. If reasons and circumstance prevented its publication, the Woolfs must not have tried very hard to overcome them. Virginia in particular, according to John Lehmann.

  Eliot’s enthusiasm served to cool her own, as did rivalry. The work too, but not for its “indecency”: she loved using crude language, no doubt even more because she led a chaste life. Being the editor of this
“daring” book would certainly have delighted her.

  The work is antinomic to her because in this revolutionary novel existence goes without saying. In an ordinary work, that would hardly matter. Whereas, once Joyce postulates existence, he proceeds with explorations and operations of wholly original audacity; a new, explosive penetration into the individual. An author organized to disorganize, deconstruct, penetrate; who draws up plans never before imagined, and completes them. But if he accomplishes his project with new means that shift, disturb, and deepen narration, he still relies upon it. Upon the display, the exposition of what he has already elaborated, beginning from this world as a given, already established, certainly underexploited by literature and which Joyce discovers, analyzes more audaciously than ever before. But the value of that process itself, unfaltering as it is, stands between Virginia Woolf and this important text, so different from her own interrogations.

  And her work, in comparison? Stunned, displaced, exiled but eager, uncertain and searching not so much for ways of rendering or even for proofs of existence as for its emergence, rising beyond the silence, tangible, integral in its transience, grasped in that flight itself. A presence that immediately seizes hold, charged with absence, loss, and desire, pulsing with exactitude, maintained in indiscernible architectures, adapted each time. In pages pierced through with what is not said there.

  Virginia Woolf will not have read Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s next work, unique at the time; there he does not appropriate language but becomes it, engenders its existence. He becomes one with it, moves about in it, plays, laughs and makes laughter burst through each space, between two letters, two syllables; the words violate one another, cutting across multiple, freed, abundant meanings. A language that creates rather than submitting to meaning, unlimited. Joyce, a vast and cunning demiurge, here at the height of the comic, the root of the tragic.

  Armed with a more traditional language, Finnegan and Joyce return toward the end (as Woolf does) to the father. To the terrible father, in abeyance: “O bitter ending! I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father.”32

  But before such a return, before her “bitter ending” as World War II begins, Virginia seems to have experienced, in the course of some twenty years, one and the same day marked by events always in the same order, a few griefs, passionate hope. Most importantly, a single day filled with attentiveness, fervor, obstacles, “horrors” relating to the books that follow one after another; a day in which she is forever surrounded and ever more exiled, isolated and struggling not to be, to be accepted like the others, to remain different.

  To stand fast, she will always have to toe the line with real life, with intimate friends and strangers steeped in convention, all of whom pique her curiosity. In fact, are exchanges with forerunners of her day actually useful? Or desirable, intrusive as they are? Moreover, aside from Joyce, among English writers at that time she has no equal.

  Well, there is that D. H. Lawrence fellow she spots twice from a distance, in a St. Ives shop and at the Roman train station, on a platform opposite hers. They exchanged two letters … regarding the sale of a house.

  It’s not (or not only) a question of social class that separates them, each snubbing the other: Lawrence is a stranger to Cambridge and any other university, which Bloomsbury considers inexpiable, and Bloomsbury enjoys “bourgeois” privilege, which Lawrence abhors, although he was Ottoline Morrell’s lover nonetheless—as were Roger Fry and Bertrand Russell, among others—before he caricatured her in Women in Love. On the occasion of the writer’s death, Virginia, indignant: “Not a first rate genius. No … my word, what a cheap little bounder he was, taking her money, books, food, lodging and then writing that book.”33

  No literary affinities: she always read him (or not) “without pleasure”; she would have rejected his mysticism. In a review of a Lawrence novel for the Times Literary Supplement, after citing some passages she admires, Virginia claims to have truly hoped for a certain originality from the author:

  We were wrong…. Details accumulated; the picture of life in Woodhouse was built up … we adopted a fresh attitude and read Mr. Lawrence as one reads Mr. Bennett—for the facts, and for the story. Mr. Lawrence shows indeed something of Mr. Bennett’s power of displaying by any means of immense industry and great ability a section of the hive beneath the glass…. And then again the laborious process continues of building up a model of life from saying how d’you do, and cutting the loaf, and knocking the cigarette ash into the ash tray, and standing the yellow bicycle against the wall. Little by little Alvina disappears beneath the heap of facts recorded about her, and the only sense in which we feel her to be lost is that we can no longer believe in her existence.34

  But, three months after Lawrence’s death, she reads Sons and Lovers and is amazed: “Now I realise with regret that a man of genius wrote in my time and I never read him. Yes, but genius obscured and distorted I think: the fact about contemporaries (I write hand to mouth) is that they’re doing the same thing on another railway line.”35

  Of the writers then living, only one dazzles her, scares, discourages her, renders her “suicidal,” and fulfills her:

  My great adventure is really Proust. Well—what remains to be written after that? I’m only in the first volume, and there are, I suppose, faults to be found, but I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes, how, at last, someone solidified what has always escaped—and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physical—like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined.36

  She continues: “Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures—theres something sexual in it—that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession.”37

  As for one of the world’s greatest thinkers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who lived in Cambridge, imagine the exchanges they could have had. Two poets, each of whom rejects any peremptory given. Wittgenstein: “If someone says ‘I have a body,’ he can be asked ‘Who is speaking here with this mouth?’” And here, very close to Virginia: “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.” And these lines, undoubtedly the last written by Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Someone who, dreaming, says ‘I am dreaming,’ even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream ‘it is raining,’ while it was in fact raining. Even if his dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain.” To end a logician’s life with the sound of falling rain!38

  The meeting will not take place; it is Lytton and above all Keynes whom Wittgenstein befriends. He and the Woolfs seem hardly to notice one another. Leonard Woolf notes only “the aggressive cruelty,” reported by Bertrand Russell, that Wittgenstein demonstrates when he is living with the Keyneses and makes Lydia cry.39

  Virginia mentions him after Keynes snubs Julian Bell when he tries to talk to him about the philosopher (no doubt because the young man satirized Keynes in a piece published in a student newspaper). He appears only one other time, when she teases Saxon Sydney-Turner: “nothing said half so clever, I daresay, as what you said to Wittgenstein—the fame of that interview has gone round the world. How you talked without ceasing, some say in an obscure Austrian dialect, of the soul, and matter, till W. was moved to offer himself to you as bootboy at Hogarth House, in order to hear you still talk.”40

  The truth is, with regard to her forays into thinking and writing, where she remains most herself, or where she does not abandon herself but struggles to return to herself, Leonard is her closest accomplice, all the more so for being respectful of that space; he doesn�
�t intervene there, but senses it, recognizes it.

  In another domain entirely, he writes as much as she does, and publishes more in his lifetime.41 Essays, mostly political, in which she takes polite interest, enough for the author, who does not share her need for it.

  But they are in almost perfect harmony over the texts they publish together—especially Virginia’s, which he only sees finished, but which she confidently writes in his proximity, because he knows what he must know of those hours, and she knows he knows.

  In those spaces, their visions can emerge side by side. Long walks at Rodmell. Intimacy. Intelligence. They know how to read, to listen together, and each of them can think peacefully near the other. Leonard’s intrusions are oppressive, harmful, but not in this domain. The space where Virginia operates is never invaded. She reigns there…. A Room of One’s Own.

  The quotidian space is another matter. There Leonard’s fussiness grows, increases, unabated.

  If Leonard is upset when Virginia, without rejecting him, swoons over Vita Sackville-West, he never shows it but remains dogged in his obsession. As she leaves to spend her first weekend with Vita alone at her home in Kent, he gives her a letter for her hostess: “I enclose Virginia & hope she will behave. The only thing I ask is that you will be adamant in sending her off to bed not 1 minute later than 11 P.M. She ought not to talk for too long a stretch at a time. It is good of you to have her.”42 No comment!

  Virginia is bewitched, enflamed, tortured. Her litanies: “Vita Vita Vita” in her letters, her diary, and when Vita travels with her husband or joins him (rarely) at some foreign post: “I have missed you. I do miss you. I shall miss you.” Or, “Honey dearest, don’t go to Egypt please. Stay in England. Love Virginia. Take her in your arms.”43