Virginia Woolf

by Gillian Gill

  When exactly Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant became lovers is unclear, though we know from Vanessa’s letter to Roger that in 1911 her naked body, newly reminiscent of a Rubens or Renoir woman after two pregnancies, had failed to “move” Duncan. What is certain is that, when she fell in love with him, she knew with absolute certainty that, whereas he liked women and felt comfortable in their company, it was men he desired.

  As we have seen, Vanessa had been made privy to intimate details about the sex lives of Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes, two of Duncan’s several lovers among the old “Cambridge” set. More pertinent to her situation circa 1915, she knew that Duncan was in love with her brother, and the two were sleeping together. Adrian Stephen, however, while willing to try sex with a man, was pursuing Karin Costelloe with a view to marriage, and this was making relations between him and Duncan difficult. It was well known in Bloomsbury that when Duncan fell madly in love with a man, and that man left him for a woman, he would lose all his sunny good humor and look, quite literally, for a shoulder to cry on. Informed that the Adrian-Karin engagement was about to be announced, Vanessa may have seized the moment to invite Duncan into her bed.

  We do not expect people in love to be rational, and temperamentally, as their forty-year partnership would prove, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell suited each other very well. Unlike Leslie Stephen, Duncan was never “ill to live with.” When not absorbed in his painting and drawing, Duncan, unlike the supercharged Roger, was always ready to kick back and enjoy the dolce far niente. Unlike Clive, Duncan was not pompous, and any social climbing he did (in later life he was a favorite painter of the Queen Mother and a valued friend of Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire) came naturally from his family’s roots in the Scottish nobility. Like Vanessa, Duncan was intelligent but not intellectual, cultured but not erudite. Like Vanessa’s, Duncan’s bohemianism rested on a solid support of unearned income. He lived on the assumption that it was the world’s duty as well as its pleasure to support its artists, and that money would come to those who were charmingly eccentric (but not mad, like poor Blake or van Gogh!) and knew how to ask nicely.

  All that said, let us pause and digest the fact that Vanessa Bell, an object of worship for the remarkable and steadfastly heterosexual Roger Fry, fell in love with the man she had just seen taking her younger brother into his bed. The faint motif of incest in Vanessa Bell’s life and the repetition compulsion emerge here once again. The relationship of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant offers, in fact, prima facie evidence that the resentment she had harbored toward her father had soured her on conventional marriage and that her relationships with George Duckworth and Jack Hills had shaped her sexuality, quite as much as the unsolicited fumblings of George and his brother Gerald had shaped Virginia’s.

  As one reads the letters and biographies of Vanessa Bell, it is hard not to wonder how many nights the beautiful, voluptuous, sensual Aphrodite of Bloomsbury mythology actually wanted to share her bed with a man. Agreeable heterosexual men were, after all, not impossible to find even among the upper classes in central London circa 1914, and Desmond MacCarthy, to choose one, might have volunteered to do for Vanessa what Clive was doing for Mary Hutchinson. As we follow the strange course of Vanessa and Duncan’s early relationship, it becomes apparent that her desire for him was fueled not so much by sexual need but by her passion for painting and children.

  By painting alongside him, Vanessa had become convinced that Duncan Grant was what she herself would like to be—a great painter. She was also in a hurry to have a third child, hoping it would be a girl. In comparison with Duncan, Roger Fry, for all his avant-garde theories, was more George Frederick Watts than Matisse. As an elderly, bony man very content with his two children and yet sexually demanding, Fry was not the man Vanessa Bell fancied conceiving a child with. In comparison the beautiful gay genius Duncan Grant seemed perfect as partner and sire.

  From the outset, the sexual compact between Duncan and Vanessa was very odd. Grant never hid the fact that, when he had sexual intercourse with Vanessa, he was doing it as a favor to a friend. Informed at the outset of how much it would mean to her to have another child, he was ready to service Vanessa as a stallion might a mare. In return, he would enjoy the pleasing home, good food, and good company she excelled in providing, and feel free to use her body for comfort and release on the odd occasions when something was going wrong with his love affairs with men. In the 1918 diary he wrote for his resident lover, David Garnett, Duncan admits, “I am so uncertain of my real feeling to V. I am utterly unable to feign more than I feel when called upon to feel much, with the consequence that I seem to feel less than I do. I suppose the only thing lacking in my feelings to her is passion. What of that there might be seems crushed out of me, by a bewildering suffering expectation of it (hardly conscious) by her. I think I feel that if I showed any, it would be met by such an avalanche that I should be crushed.”

  Duncan Grant was famous for his frankness, for his lack of pretense, and he set the terms of his relationship with Vanessa at the start, never deceiving her or promising more than he was willing to give. Nonetheless, by the end of 1914, Vanessa had decided that she could not live without him.

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  A key turn in the relationship between Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant occurred at a dinner party in a swank London restaurant hosted by Maynard Keynes in January 1915. In an act of Mephistophelian mischief, Maynard, who had no doubt got wind of Vanessa’s passion for Duncan, placed Duncan between Vanessa and a newcomer to the group, David Garnett, usually known as Bunny.

  Garnett, twenty-three, tall, blond, athletic, heavily muscled, was, as Maynard knew full well, exactly the kind of man Duncan found irresistible. Indeed, after the dinner, Bunny and Duncan went off into the night together and had sex, and Duncan quickly forgot about Adrian Stephen. Garnett could (and later did) boast of a phallic potency that was a match even for Grant’s and, having recently heard Lytton Strachey deliver a panegyric to libertinism, he was eager to experiment with sex with a male, especially an attractive and influential older man like Grant. All the same, as Duncan was well aware, Bunny never thought of himself as anything other than heterosexual.

  As soon as she saw Bunny Garnett seated next to Duncan at the restaurant, Vanessa knew that she had a rival, and a formidable one. Duncan did not repine for long when a lover dumped him, and Maynard had put gorgeous Bunny almost literally in his lap. Ever the pragmatist, Vanessa came to the rapid conclusion that she would have to have Bunny, or some version of Bunny, if she was to keep Duncan in her life. So she made her own move, and it seemed to work marvelously.

  At Maynard’s dinner party, Bunny had not been insensible to the charms of the woman seated next to Duncan. Bunny liked experienced older women and had already taken a couple of them into his bed. When the delightfully full-bodied Mrs. Bell asked when they might meet again, he asked her to tea the next week. She duly came to his flat and was entertained with tea and, in a deliciously Freudian move, sticky chocolate éclairs, and the two of them seemed to hit it off. Bunny happily confided in his diary that he and Vanessa Bell, Lytton’s intimate friend and the doyenne of Bloomsbury society, were on the same libertine page.

  For the next year or so, while her sister was once again in a clinic, and friends like Rupert Brooke and Cecil Woolf died on the battlefield along with millions of other young men, Vanessa Bell was living with her Duncan and his Bunny at Wissett Lodge, a rundown property in Suffolk belonging to Duncan’s family. Vanessa arrived there with her two young sons and a cartful of trunks, plus Trissie and Flossie, her nurse and cook, and she refused to be dismayed by the lack of running water and electricity. With her boys occupied with exploring their new rural domain under the nominal supervision of Trissie, Vanessa had her mornings to herself for painting projects. Meanwhile Duncan and Bunny made desultory attempts to get the market garden and orchard in shape and thus satisfy the conditions of their exemption from military service.

  Vanessa Bell took a number of
photographs of her family and guests at Wissett Lodge, and several of them show her sons running happily around the estate without any clothes on. In Vanessa Bell’s Family Album, the collection of his mother’s pictures that he and his sister, Angelica, published in 1981, Quentin Bell claims that these shots of him and his older brother as little chubby, curly children are some of the best examples of his mother’s skill at photographic composition. He also says that the pictures were by way of being studies of “putti”—the naked cherubs often featured in baroque paintings. Today, the Tate Gallery, which is the repository of Vanessa Bell’s photographs, has withdrawn all these nude images of the Bell children from their catalog, and refuses to allow them to be reproduced unless they are of central importance to an artist’s or scholar’s work. One photograph that appeared as recently as 2003 in Robert Skidelsky’s biography of John Maynard Keynes indicates that even Vanessa’s friends may have been unsettled by her love of taking rolls of film of her naked sons. Keynes, seated in a garden chair, has the two Bell boys on his lap, one facing in and one facing out, and he raises his knee to conceal the outer child’s genitalia.

  A series of visitors descended on Wissett on weekends, including the extraordinarily attired Lady Ottoline, who appreciated neither the fleas in her bed nor the firecracker with which Julian Bell lit her cigarette. Julian, one gathers, was the proverbial imp of Satan and, though the focus of Vanessa’s maternal attention, not a very happy little nine-year-old. Julian had inherited a large measure of what Virginia Woolf called “the Stephen integrity” and, unlike his mother, was very worried about the war. When staying with the Woolfs one night, he woke up his aunt Virginia to discuss what was happening on the battlefield. Chubby, wheezy Quentin (he would suffer from serious bouts of lung disease as an adolescent and young man), barely seven, just tried to keep up with his big brother.

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  When Bunny went off to work with a Quaker ambulance corps in France, Vanessa had Duncan to herself, and they both sent Bunny affectionate little letters. When he came back after a few months, having seen more than enough of war, and fell once again into Duncan’s welcoming arms, Vanessa slipped the jobless Bunny the odd five-pound note. This was unusual generosity for a woman whose domestic budget was perennially stretched, but Vanessa still needed Duncan, and to Duncan, Bunny still managed to be indispensable. Questioned by her husband, Clive, on the progress of her love affair with Duncan, Vanessa admitted in a letter that “no little Grant has yet had a chance to come into existence.”

  This remark offers interesting insight into an unusual marriage. Clive Bell had been grumpy and jealous when his wife took up with Roger Fry, but then Fry was everything Clive wished he could be—except poor. Clive and Duncan, on the other hand, hit it off perfectly: as old men, after the death of Vanessa, they would continue to live together at Charleston for some years. Clive saw Duncan as a social asset, not a threat to his manhood, and was perfectly happy, if I may attempt a cricket metaphor, to have Duncan and his googlies join the side and take the occasional over.

  But by the beginning of 1916, even Vanessa could not keep her head in the sand about the war, and it was harder than ever for “conchies” like Duncan and Bunny to walk in the streets. The local authorities in Suffolk decreed, not unreasonably, that the men at Wissett Lodge were doing nothing to nourish the nation. At the beginning of 1916 universal conscription was declared for all British males between eighteen and forty, so the status as conscientious objectors of Morgan Forster, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Adrian Stephen, Duncan Grant, and David Garnett came under official reexamination. The mandatory medical examination eliminated Lytton, a man whom even the most jingoistic of doctors could not imagine hefting a pack, as well as Leonard, with his uncontrollable hand tremor, and Adrian, who was discovered to have a chronic heart ailment. Clive, Duncan, and Bunny, however, were all deemed fit for service in an army that had already lost a million men, and they were summoned to appear before their local draft board—a group of men selected for their patriotism and known to take a very poor view of “conchies,” especially rugged young ones like Garnett.

  It was at this point that Vanessa Bell took matters into her own hands. She prevailed on her friend Maynard Keynes, a big wheel at the Treasury, to use his influence at the appeal hearing to get conscientious objector status approved for both Grant and Garnett. She charmed a farmer close to Asheham, her former rental in Sussex, to take both men on as agricultural workers and thus fulfill their commitment to support the war effort. And she discovered Charleston, a large, elegant, remote, and dilapidated farmhouse from which Grant and Garnett could cycle to work, and she moved her household and her children there.

  Life in the Charleston farmhouse between the spring of 1916 and the end of 1918 was not a picnic in the park with ants in the smoked salmon sandwiches, as it had been at Wissett Lodge. As the war dragged on, food became increasingly difficult to obtain even in the countryside, and Vanessa Bell had to scramble to find women servants willing to move to a dilapidated farm ten miles from the nearest railway station. One of the jobs Virginia Woolf took on when she returned to health after her breakdown was visiting domestic employment agencies, writing letters, and interviewing maids and governesses on her sister’s behalf. The women Woolf found were, unsurprisingly, a rather odd bunch, and they tended to leave as soon as a better position came up.

  No longer standing rapt before her easel each morning while waiting for cook to give the signal for lunch, Vanessa grimly turned her hand to things her mother had left to the servants or ordered in from the shops. She kept ducks and chickens, planted and weeded and harvested a large vegetable garden and a fruit orchard, made bread and cake and jam and pickles, sewed clothes, kept her free-ranging sons from killing themselves, and taught them Latin when it rained. When the two men returned at night, weary and numb from farm work, they found a fire in the hearth, a pot of water heating to wash and shave with, and some sort of dinner simmering on the hob. On weekends, Vanessa and Duncan still set up their easels side by side, and the dull surfaces and battered furniture of the old house also began to glow with brilliantly colored designs.

  When, in mid-August 1918, Virginia Woolf was at last well enough to come to Charleston and see how her sister was doing, she recorded how deeply impressed she was by the burden of domestic care Vanessa had shouldered. She was also astonished by the meagerness of the meals. For a very thin woman inclined to anorexia, it was rather a new experience for Virginia Woolf to find herself wishing for second helpings. The pump supplying well water for the household was very temperamental, so Vanessa, Virginia noticed, had given up bathing, and her clothing was barely decent. Attempting to write a letter, Woolf dipped her pen into an inkpot and found it clogged with dead flies. “My visit to Charleston,” Virginia wrote in her diary, “was spent mostly in sitting in the drawing [room] & talking to N [Nessa] while she made herself a small brown coat. Duncan wandered in & out, sometimes digging a vegetable bed, sometimes painting a water colour of bedroom china, pinned to a door. In the evening there was the lumpish Bunny inclined to be surly & N [Nessa] inclined to take him up sharply.”

  That night in the farmhouse kitchen there was a discussion of money, “which is not any longer a distant speculative sort of commodity,” Virginia wrote. She was outraged to hear Bunny spout a socialist ideology, which seemed to mean in practice that a woman like Mrs. Clive Bell should be glad to spend her unearned income maintaining an artist like him. The famous Bunny Garnett charm had no effect on Virginia Woolf, who describes him as a tongue-tied, socially inept young man, “caked with earth, stiff as a clod, you can almost see the docks & nettles sprouting from his mind; his sentences creak with rust.”

  Here Woolf is being unfair. Garnett was far from stupid: he had a first-class degree in science from London University, and after the war he would quickly make his name as a writer, editor, and publisher. Eager to maintain his superb physique, Bunny did not mind manual labor, and he was the one who did most of the farm work
while Duncan smoked and looked on. He was a real help in the vegetable garden and the orchard at Charleston, and the honey from the hives he kept was precious. Virginia felt able to criticize Bunny in her diary because she heard Vanessa “taking him up sharply” and saw that her sister was at odds with the man. Bunny was a subject on which the sisters could agree and unite. Duncan, on the other hand, who was also depending on Vanessa’s largesse and allowing the domestic burden to fall mainly on her shoulders, enjoyed immunity from Virginia’s Woolf’s famous putdowns.

  There was no way for Vanessa Bell to hide from her sister the practical problems she faced at Charleston. What Vanessa kept to herself, because it reflected on her own judgment, was the emotional powder keg she had chosen to sit on. The relationship between Duncan and Bunny was stormy, and all too often the men came to blows, making the oil lamps flicker and threatening to wake the sleeping boys upstairs. They openly shared a bedroom but would also go off to London from time to time to find other sex partners. Whereas Bunny didn’t care how many men Duncan slept with, Duncan was violently jealous about Bunny’s women, notably his dalliances with Barbara Hiles and his hot pursuit of Alix Sargant-Florence. When Duncan got wind of Bunny’s London adventures, he turned both tearful and violent.