The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  “V has relapse w temperature,” Leonard wrote just before her birthday. She went back to bed, with a second attack “more wearisome than the first.” Wearisome and worrisome. At the start of the epidemic the Times had reported that the course of the influenza was usually about ten days—but that in weakened patients, there was a tendency to relapse that was worse than the first incident. The nationwide pattern was worsening, and Virginia’s recovery continued to be slow. The Times and Fergusson concurred on the “best advice”: to keep working and to maintain a normal schedule as long as one felt well “and not meet trouble halfway by brooding on the possibility of attack”; but at the first sign of illness one “should go to bed at once, for their own and their neighbours’ sake.”

  Three years after the Armistice, the war was receding in time, but new reports of illness and rising death tolls brought the memory of it closer again: the influenza epidemic of 1918–19 had brought more death than the war itself. The idea of a new national epidemic took increasing hold through January, as Virginia’s second attack continued to worsen. The pope died, of influenza that became pneumonia, on Sunday, January 22. Virginia recorded his dying in her diary. The death of explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, from heart failure caused by complications of influenza, was reported in the Times on January 30. He had died, in South America, on January 5, at the beginning of a new voyage to the Antarctic, the same day Virginia herself became ill. The epidemic was also spreading across the Continent. Vanessa’s children came down with it, though this did not prevent Vanessa from returning to Paris after only a fortnight at home.

  * * *

  January 25 was Virginia’s birthday. She saw uncomfortable truths weighing on her present and future, and thought with some confusion about her own achievements. Something ought to be settled about a writer at forty. In an essay about Laurence Sterne in the New York Herald Tribune, she would observe that he published Tristram Shandy, his first novel, “at a time when many have written their twentieth, that is, when he was forty-five years old.” The hyperbole touched on a truth about her own slow start. Virginia Woolf, nearing forty in January 1922, was not quite the writer she had imagined she would be by now.

  In December 1920 she had toted up, “Nearing the end of the year.… Here we sit over the fire, expecting Roger—whose book is out; as everyone’s book is out—Katherine’s, Murry’s, Eliot’s. None have I read so far.” These were Katherine Mansfield; her husband, John Middleton Murry, editor of the Athenaeum literary magazine and a critic and novelist; and T. S. Eliot, whose poetry the Hogarth Press had published in 1919, and whose first book of criticism, The Sacred Wood, had just been published by Methuen. As the winter of 1922 deepened, and the twenty-fifth approached, January seemed to Virginia not the auspicious beginning to a new year she had confidently looked forward to returning to from Rodmell, but rather the demoralizing continuation, the lowest end point, of a year of writing that had not, she despaired, gone well.

  Postponing the publication of Jacob’s Room demoralized her: “K. M. bursts upon the world in glory next week,” she wrote in January, when another book of Mansfield’s, a collection of stories, was about to be published. Virginia had hoped, the first week of November, to finish Jacob’s Room “in two days [sic] time—during the weekend at any rate.” She had done it, and had put the loss of summer behind her, knowing that what lay ahead was “to furbish up Jacob.” But the plan that seemed feasible as she and Leonard were at Monk’s House at Christmas was very far from possible a month later. The delay until autumn left her worrying that by then “it will appear to me sterile acrobatics.” To herself—and to others.

  The unwelcome prospect of a birthday left Virginia ever more conscious that her achievements in the art of fiction were beginning to seem very distant in time, merely anachronistic relics of a prewar England that had been summarily swept away.

  Her first novel, The Voyage Out, had been published in 1915, during the first year of World War I. Her second, Night and Day, appeared in 1919, roughly a year after the Armistice. The two novels hardly looked to her, nor could they to anyone else, she was sure, like precursors of an imminent literary breakthrough. The Voyage Out had actually been finished, at great emotional and psychological cost, a full decade ago—in 1912. She had spent her twenties writing one version or another of it, but a nervous breakdown, and then the start of the war, had delayed its publication. As for its successor, Night and Day, it had been received with praise for its formal elegance but was criticized, too. Gently if unmistakably, by E. M. Forster, who admired The Voyage Out as fresh and innovative and thought Night and Day a step backward, less decorously by Katherine Mansfield.

  “We had thought that this world had vanished for ever,” Mansfield wrote in the Athenaeum, “that it was impossible to find on the great ocean of literature a ship that was unaware of what had been happening. Yet here is Night and Day, fresh, new and exquisite, a novel in the tradition of the English novel. In the midst of our admiration it makes us feel old and chill. We had never thought to look upon its like again!”

  In private, Mansfield was more scathing, writing to Middleton Murry in terms that she could not print: the novel was “a lie in the soul”; “so long and so tahsome”; contemptible for its “boundless vanity and conceit.” But Virginia had read between Mansfield’s published lines, and even as she savored the praise of other reviewers and friends, she questioned the favorable judgments: Night and Day was a novel of manners, apparently written in a social and political vacuum, and what good was that? Meanwhile, everywhere in London, other (often younger) writers were writing, publishing, rising in popularity and fame.

  The opinionated Virginia was the doyenne of a remarkable literary circle that her contemporaries regarded, and either admired or ridiculed, as almost unnaturally set apart. It was “a kind of glittering village with no doors,” Enid Bagnold, the author of National Velvet, would remember. “It hovered ungeographically and had to my mind, only one inhabitant—a woman with a magnet.” Bloomsbury—so specific as a place but so elusive to pinpoint or define—was, in its earliest beginnings, the London outgrowth of a coterie of friends from Cambridge, among them Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s brother Thoby Stephen, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, and E. M. Forster, who, with some others, moved to, or at least in and out of, London between 1900 and the start of World War I. “Bloomsbury” was an urban version of the university world in which, with varying degrees of separation, they had met, in groups like the Cambridge Apostles, a society of skeptics willing to question every accepted idea, including, in later years, whether “Bloomsbury” itself had ever existed.

  A hallmark of Bloomsbury was “the cultured attitude” painter and critic Roger Fry thought could not be acquired by study; the common ground of those opposing Bloomsbury, whether from critical conviction or dismay about its perceived social or cultural pretensions, was, Fry thought, “envy and a hatred of intellectual freedom.” Yet the intellectual rectitude of Bloomsbury bordered on, and blurred into, what others saw as self-satisfaction, a dead end. Virginia Woolf’s magnetic pull had little allure to those who, publicly and privately, deplored the group’s snobbery and claustrophobia, what one writer called its “central heating.” Eliot himself had once despaired over the “Bloomsburial” of Aldous Huxley—worrying, not a little, that he might be similarly tarred by too close an association.

  “La belle Virginia,” as Clive Bell called her, tongue only partly in cheek, had long since taken her place as a prolific arbiter of taste, a woman among the great conversationalists of her day, a secular priestess in a coterie where conversation was near to religion.

  When, after Lytton Strachey’s death, Dora Carrington read through his correspondence with his old Cambridge friends, she “suddenly felt the quintessence” of the undergraduate bond that gave rise to Bloomsbury: “a marvellous combination of the higher intelligence and appreciation of literature with a lean humour and tremendous affection.” They drew around them those like them—sisters (
Virginia and Vanessa Stephen); returning civil service administrators (Leonard, who returned from Ceylon in 1911 and married Virginia the next year); husbands and lovers (Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Dora Carrington herself); and in circles expanding outward, the lovers of those people, too (Mary Hutchinson, Clive’s mistress, and Mary’s husband, Jack), and artists, writers, socialites, among them Ottoline Morrell and T. S. Eliot and his wife, Vivien. What they prized, and honed, was an ability, in conversation, to give it “backwards and forwards to each other like shuttlecocks, only the shuttlecocks multiplied as they flew in the air,” Carrington wrote. Yet the volley itself was not enough. Eliot wrote once of a woman he met who had a “remarkable flow” of talk, but who, he realized, fell beneath the uniquely high Bloomsbury standards of conversation that had won his admiration and raised his own game. Bloomsbury people had mastered the deployment of silences, pauses offered, and recognized as an essential part of what was at its best a theatrical dialogue—“opportunities for the other person to show his wit.”

  Remembering a later period, novelist Christopher Isherwood evoked the scene: “We are at the tea table. Virginia is sparkling with gaiety, delicate malice, and gossip—the gossip which … made her the best hostess in London.” The gifts that made her an attractive hostess were deployed somewhat differently as a critic—but to no lesser scintillating or withering effect. From a very young age, beginning in the nursery, “speech became the deadliest weapon as used by her,” Vanessa was to say; later, Virginia perfected the art of putting “her living presence” into her work: “When one had spent half an hour in a room with her one could easily believe that it was she who … had scribbled quickly in purple ink in the summer house at Rodmell that fresh and sparkling article that had just appeared in the Nation.”

  Even her warmest enthusiasm couldn’t (and wasn’t meant to) entirely conceal a devastating, often wounding, capacity for judgment of writers who were friends, rivals, or frequently both. “I see she is very beautiful & very distinguished—but she is so full of mockery & contempt & sees people entirely wrong … because having no humanity she really cannot see what is human,” wrote Ottoline Morrell, who fell into both categories, in her diary. Educated, entertaining, aristocratic, generous, Morrell oversaw the salon that was Garsington; she had admirers as well as detractors—the writer Siegfried Sassoon lovingly hailed her in 1922 as “O Philosophress of Garsington”—and her ego was as fragile as Virginia’s. Morrell continued to worry over Virginia’s judgment of her and in her diary added to her first thought in a different, darker ink: “Her contempt is not balanced by her heart.”

  Virginia voiced her verdicts publicly in print and rather more regularly in private—in her diary or in frank letters to friends, among them Eliot and Forster, to Vanessa, to Clive Bell, and an array of others. Clive, variously “the Yellow Cockatoo” and “the Yellow Bird of Bloomsbury,” played a particular role in the “orchestral concerts” of conversation that the regular Bloomsbury evenings usually became: to “keep up a general roar of animation” and “to egg on and provoke Virginia to one of her famous sallies.”

  During a trip to America in 1920, Sassoon wrote to Ottoline Morrell about the sense of waste that London, and the Bloomsberries, kindled in him. “From this distance,” he wrote from Lake Forest, Illinois, “I look back on it with something like despair—all those clever people saying ill-natured things about one another—cackle, cackle … [ellipses in original].” Forster, separating himself from Bloomsbury idolatry even as he remained close to Leonard in particular, and Strachey, and Keynes—the “old” Bloomsbury—was always wary of what its insularity crystallized: “The London intellect, so pert and shallow, like a stream that never reaches the ocean.”

  * * *

  And of course there were also the confidences offered to Leonard, her husband, partner in the Hogarth Press, and first reader (though he did not read her work in progress—he only read it once she had completed her revisions). Leonard and Virginia, echoing the humor of their friends, often referred to themselves in the third person—they were “the Woolves,” together forming a pair different—in name and character—from the usual plural. Virginia, or Fate, had chosen her husband well—her married name, together with her own, Adeline Virginia, encompassed the contradictions of her personality with an inevitability that was as accidental as it was apt. “Tenuousness and purity were in her baptismal name, and a hint of the fang in the other,” Vita Sackville-West wrote.

  Virginia was quick to fault most of her contemporaries’ otherwise lauded accomplishments, often with her own good reasons, and she claimed, repeatedly, to be deeply suspicious of the idea of literary celebrity itself. She acknowledged her jealousy—of Katherine Mansfield, of James Joyce, of T. S. Eliot—in her diary and letters, and disclaimed it in alternate paragraphs (or even phrases). Once she was even “momentarily” jealous of Leonard, after a good review of a short story of his appeared in the Daily Mail: “But the odd thing is—the idiotic thing—is that I immediately think myself a failure—imagine myself peculiarly lacking in the qualities L. has,” she wrote in her diary. (Leonard published two acclaimed novels before her own first novel was published but did not write another. The first Hogarth book, Two Stories, contained one each by Leonard and Virginia.) When her own work was going well, then the jealousy passed as quickly as it came. When it was going badly, the jealousy lingered.

  This winter, her doubts about her position sharpened by her impending birthday, she protested in her diary that she wasn’t concerned with fame, that she had other achievements in mind. This went hand in hand with her disillusion about her past accomplishments and the slackened pace of her current work—but her sense of imminent failure was amplified by the fact that she was confined to home and had time, not writing, to ruminate.

  “I have made up my mind that I’m not going to be popular, & so genuinely that I look upon disregard or abuse as part of my bargain,” she claimed to herself. “I’m to write what I like; & they’re to say what they like. My only interest as a writer lies, I begin to see, in some queer individuality; not in strength, or passion, or anything startling; but then I say to myself, is not ‘some queer individuality’ precisely the quality I respect?” Not writing had brought, at least temporarily, a kind of clarity about the ends she sought, or would seek, when, eventually, she was writing again.

  * * *

  Just before her birthday, on the twenty-first, Virginia wrote to E. M. Forster, who she and Leonard had learned at dinner with Forster’s mother would soon be returning to England after nearly a year in India. In March 1921, she had wondered whether she would ever see him again. The prospect of his arrival was a happy surprise, and her letter, a long one, would reach him at Port Said on his journey home. She confided to Morgan the disquiet she had also described in her diary. Time was running short, she wrote him.

  … I was stricken with the influenza, and here I am, a fortnight later, still in bed, though privileged to take a stroll in the sun for half an hour—after lunch.

  But it is not going to be sunny today.

  * * *

  Writing is still like heaving bricks over a wall; so you must interpret with your usual sympathy. I should like to growl to you about all this damned lying in bed and doing nothing, and getting up and writing half a page and going to bed again. I’ve wasted 5 whole years (I count) doing it; so you must call me 35—not 40—and expect rather less from me. Not that I haven’t picked up something from my insanities and all the rest. Indeed, I suspect they’ve done instead of religion. But this is a difficult point.

  Her letter, with its cheerfully grim, self-deprecatory confession, found an apt recipient in Forster—the “evanescent, piping, elusive” Morgan, “timid, touching, infinitely charming” and “whimsical & vagulous,” as Virginia variously attempted to encapsulate him during their long friendship. This “vaguely rambling butterfly” would interpret with his usual sympathy because Virginia had chosen her correspondent carefully.

  The evo
cative monotony of her heaving of bricks, whether it was to write the letter itself that he must interpret sympathetically or a novel, would resound with him, and the totting up of wasted years would, too. Here was a friend, and one with a more august reputation all around, who had last published a novel far longer ago than she had. Virginia’s playful calculation of her real age as a writer barely concealed a despondency she understood Morgan, too, knew well. He had recently published an anonymous article in the Nation—“‘Too Late in India’ occurs on the front page in the largest letters”—that she recognized as his by the “neckties and the grammar.” Nevertheless, she added, “But I won’t bother you about your writing.” That would be a relief to him. He was bothering himself enough about it, and writing no fiction at all.

  The agony of perhaps having to expect less from yourself and asking your friends to do the same, of being found wanting in your own estimation and in others’ eyes—these were subjects Woolf and Forster had gingerly broached between them before the bleak, cold beginning of 1922. Now, the damned lying in bed left her surveying her achievements and her prospects with what Joseph Conrad, sick with influenza that winter, too, confided to a friend was “the peculiar invalid’s acuteness of emotion.”

  * * *

  The news in the Times on Saturday, February 4, 1922, was grim: “There have been 13,000 deaths from influenza in England and Wales since Christmas.”

  Virginia was still in bed that day, very slowly—too slowly—recovering from the second attack. She had now been in bed for a month. Her heart had become “naturally abnormal” and she worried about death. “I have taken it into my head that I shan’t live till 70,” she wrote in her diary. “Suppose, I said to myself the other day this pain over my heart wrung me out like a dish cloth & left me dead?”