by Gillian Gill
16. Vanessa’s Way, Part 2
the very kind of man: The 1987 biography of Duncan Grant by Douglas Blair Turnbaugh (Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group: An Illustrated Biography) features a large number of reproductions of Grant’s nude studies of men, as well as a nude study of himself as a young man.
actually had all that sex: Unlike his friend, patron, and one-time lover Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant did not keep a list of his amours and his conquests. But as Turnbaugh’s biography makes clear, his life was one very long (he lived to be ninety-three) succession of lovers—relatives like Lytton, fellow artists like George Bergen, beautiful young bisexuals like David Garnett and Paul Roche, criminal types picked up on the street, and boys solicited on the train between London and Lewes, the railway station nearest to Charleston. Grant preferred sleeping with young, beautiful men who could serve as models.
it was men he desired: Reportedly Grant was once taken to a heterosexual brothel as a very young man, and managed to perform well. He also had a brief fling with an actress. Apart from these experiences, and his affair with Vanessa Bell, all his sexual partners were male.
“I am so uncertain of”: Spalding, Vanessa Bell, pp. 172–73.
David Garnett: For my account of David Garnett I am indebted to Sarah Knights’s carefully researched and fair-minded biography Bloomsbury’s Outsider: A Life of David Garnett (London: Bloomsbury Reader, 2015).
tall, blond, athletic: The arresting cover of Knights’s book shows Garnett from the back, naked, climbing up to a second-story window.
at Wissett Lodge: Here I am simplifying the series of country places occupied by the Bell-Grant-Garnett threesome in the first years of the war. For the full account, see Spalding, Vanessa Bell.
“no little Grant has yet”: Spalding, Vanessa Bell, p. 139, quoting a letter from Vanessa to Clive tentatively dated to March 25, 1915.
conscientious objectors: Bloomsbury is somewhat famous for its antiwar stance during World War I, but in fact the group was divided. Maynard was far too valuable to the Treasury to be sent to the trenches. His formidable efforts to make the British war machine as economical as possible was one of the reasons why he was so disliked by his fellow Apostle Bertrand Russell, the most cogent exponent of the antiwar cause and a man willing to go to jail for his arguments. Morgan Forster was sent to Egypt with the Red Cross, did diligent work there, and met an Egyptian taxi driver who changed his life. Desmond MacCarthy had, as they say, a good war, as part of naval intelligence. Saxon Sydney-Turner continued in the civil service. Leonard was willing to fight alongside his two brothers, one of whom was killed in the war, the other seriously wounded in the same battle, but the severe tremor in Leonard’s hand made him a poor choice to bear arms.
could not imagine hefting: It is well established that Lytton Strachey suffered from Marfan syndrome, a degenerative disease of the connective tissue.
“My visit to Charleston”: The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 182.
“caked with earth, stiff”: Ibid., p. 189.
dalliances with Barbara Hiles: Barbara Hiles was one of the Slade School “Cropheads” who invaded Bloomsbury, rather to the indignation of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Saxon Sydney-Turner was very much in love with Barbara, and David Garnett had sex with her, but she married Nicholas Bagenal, a lower-class Irish man who also worshiped at the Bloomsbury altar. After the death of her husband, according to Quentin Bell in Bloomsbury Recalled, Barbara Bagenal hooked up with Clive Bell, serving as his social secretary and travel companion. Though they did not at all care for her, Clive’s children and his friends were grateful to Barbara for keeping their libidinous father more or less on the straight and narrow.
Alix Sargant-Florence: Michael Holroyd, who knew her through his research on Lytton Strachey, intriguingly describes Alix Sargant-Florence Strachey as “author of ‘The Unconscious Motives of War,’ a once brilliant cricket player and dancer at night clubs.” Sarah Knights, the biographer of David Garnett, says that Alix, “six feet tall and stick thin,” was possessed of “a Red Indian profile . . . and a first-class mind” and notes that she proved unexpectedly resistant to David Garnett’s virile allure. Reportedly, Alix tried to cure her analysand Harry Norton’s homosexuality by having sex with him—an interesting twist on therapy abuse, and quite unsuccessful.
Alix Strachey has long been assumed by historians of psychoanalysis to be merely an assistant to her husband, James, in translating into English and editing the landmark Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. But it was Alix, not James, who studied modern languages at Cambridge, and the contemporary letters and memoirs prove that James Strachey put his formidable intellect in gear only after he finally agreed to marry Alix. It was she who decided they should go to Vienna for analysis with Freud, and, if I interpret a remark by Lytton correctly, it may have been Alix who first came up with the idea of translating Freud into English. “The story of the Prof’s [that is, Sigmund Freud’s] treachery to Alix over her translation was very shocking,” wrote Lytton to his brother James in Vienna, on April 14, 1921, “but if yours holds good I suppose she can now devote herself to that.” The Letters of Lytton Strachey, p. 484.
“that he had for a long time”: Spalding, Vanessa Bell, p. 169.
“I copulated on Saturday”: Ibid., p. 172.
younger women like Fredegond: Virginia Woolf had given the nicknames “the Turnip,” “the Owl,” and “the Bat” to Carrington, Alix, and Fredegond, respectively. Upon learning this, they indignantly launched a concerted attack on Woolf at the 1917 Club. Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 380.
“A fortnight ago all”: The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 208.
D. H. Lawrence: Following the death of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf said that she was shocked and grieved, especially as Lawrence was younger than she was, but confessed she had never been able to get through any of his novels.
forty or fifty pounds: In the 1920s, Vanessa Bell had a successful solo exhibition in London and sold a number of paintings, but neither she nor Grant could compare with Augustus John, who was getting several hundred pounds for every canvas, at sold-out exhibitions. Vanessa was also commissioned to decorate rooms and design fabrics and furniture for family and friends, and Virginia was scrupulous in her insistence on paying Vanessa for her work. On April 29, 1929, she sent Vanessa a check for 39 pounds, 6 shillings, 8 pence. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, p. 45, note 4. And she had much of the furniture from the house in Cassis, which Vanessa and Duncan had decorated for her, shipped back, at some expense, to Monk’s House. Vanessa Bell also, of course, did the cover designs for all of Virginia’s published works.
“You’ve wrecked one”: Entry for Saturday, July 27, 1918, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 172. Throughout the diary, Clive Bell features as a fat, balding blowhard, absurdly small in accomplishments compared with Virginia’s husband, Leonard, and relentlessly engaged in self-promotion. By the late 1920s, he is recorded by Virginia as an aging Lothario, a laughingstock in London, and an embarrassment to his family.
“chained in a kitchen”: Ibid., p. 314.
“Mary produced chocolates”: Ibid., p. 197.
“I see that it is after”: Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. 223.
be known as Angelica: Angelica Garnett’s names at birth were registered as Helen Vanessa. The name Angelica, by which she was thereafter always known, was reportedly added at the suggestion of Virginia Woolf.
The agreement reached: Priya Parmar, in her novel Vanessa and Her Sister (New York: Ballantine Books, 2014), says that Virginia Woolf was of no help when Vanessa was giving birth to Angelica. The published correspondence indicates that this is inaccurate.
the 1st Lord Melbourne: I offer a sketch of the social background of Queen Victoria’s beloved Lord Melbourne in my book We Two.
suited him very well: Both Maynard Keynes and Duncan Grant, unlike Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell, were close to their mothers as boys and men, and Grant’s mother, a skillful needlewoma
n, worked a number of her son’s designs for chair seats and cushions. Mrs. Grant and Vanessa Bell maintained polite relations, but on one occasion, when Vanessa, with her daughter and the nanny in tow, arrived in France, where Duncan had fallen ill with typhoid, Mrs. Grant and her sister made it clear that Duncan’s health was their concern, not Vanessa’s.
Infidelities and illegitimate children: Douglas Blair Turnbaugh’s biography, among others, is informative about the unconventional lives of members of Duncan Grant’s family.
left-wing intellectuals: David Garnett’s mother, Constance Garnett, famous in the annals of literature for bringing Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky to the English reading public, was paid a pittance for her immense labors of translation. As a very young man David was even more radical than his family, risking imprisonment in his support of Indian anarchist groups. One reason why David Garnett became a friend of Julian Bell’s when Julian was at Cambridge is that Garnett, unlike the men at Charleston, understood and sympathized with Bell’s left-wing views, having held them himself at about the same age.
“She is a wistful, patient”: Entry for Wednesday, March 5, 1919, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 250.
“Its beauty is the remarkable”: Widely quoted, including in Spalding, Vanessa Bell, p. 177.
“They recognised in”: A. Garnett, Deceived with Kindness, pp. 28–29.
By narrative magic: David Garnett, Aspects of Love (London: Chatto & Windus, 1955; New York: Knopf, 1990). First put on in the West End, then on Broadway, the show Aspects of Love was made into a movie and is still being licensed to amateur musical groups. Rights to the novel have proved a gold mine for Garnett’s surviving children.
“all kinds of people besides”: A. Garnett, Deceived with Kindness, pp. 41 and 42.
she finally learned: This claim by Bell Garnett is contested by Sarah Knights, who cites a diary entry by David Garnett in which he says that he told Angelica, then his lover but not his wife, of his relationship with Grant during World War I.
a magical grandmother: This is the testimony of Henrietta Garnett in “Visits to Charleston: Vanessa,” her contribution to the collection Charleston, Past and Present (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987).
Then, as if Quentin: Quentin Bell, in the chapter on his early years in his 1995 Bloomsbury Recalled, calls himself “piggy in the middle.” He was the child both his parents loved least, noticed least, praised least. In his essay on his mother, Quentin Bell is calm and judicious, but his very even-handedness makes it all the more devastating when he does judge. “Of the three of us I was the least precious,” he wrote, “but in saying this I would not suggest that I did not have as much maternal affection as any one person could cope with” (p. 96). He does not say so, but he is surely suggesting that his older brother, Julian, who rushed off to his death in the Spanish Civil War in 1935, and his sister, who in 1984 revealed how unhappy and self-destructive she had been in her life, may have had more maternal affection than they could cope with.
“. . . but Angelica being of”: Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, pp. 278–79.
“came in conflict with the police”: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, p. 129.
“[Virginia] tried to probe”: A. Garnett, Deceived with Kindness, p. 114.
17. Virginia’s Way, Part 2
Together, they glued the pages: An early imprint of the Hogarth Press, a narrative poem about Paris by Hope Mirrlees, has been acquired by the Smith College Library. It is very slender, very amateurish, and very moving.
“She says she will not”: Entry for June 9, 1919, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 279.
“I can’t tell you how”: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, p. 40.
“How I hated marrying”: Ibid., pp. 195–96.
“I find, with Katherine”: Entries for April 17 and May 16, 1919, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, pp. 265 and 273.
Dorothy Strachey Bussy: Dorothy Strachey Bussy was a fascinating woman, and I tend to think of Lytton as her little brother. In her thirties, Dorothy astonished her family by announcing her marriage to the French painter Simon Bussy and moving to France to live with him. In the eyes of the Strachey clan, Bussy was an uneducated peasant and his house in France was a hovel, but the Bussy marriage succeeded and they had a wonderful daughter, Janie. She became a friend and instructor in left-wing ideology to Quentin Bell and died tragically young, of gas poisoning, in her bath. Dorothy was an excellent writer and linguist, and she was formerly best known as the English translator of André Gide, whom she passionately loved and admired. Today Strachey Bussy is best known as the author of the anonymously published 1949 novel Olivia (now reissued by Amazon Books), which has become a classic in lesbian literature.
The lesbian and gay communities: When in late summer 2017 I was visiting Lamb House and Smallhythe, along with Knole and Sissinghurst, all within a short distance of one another, the National Trust guides told me of the ongoing effort in England to explore the gay and lesbian cultures of the interwar period and find out how they interacted. When I went to the British Museum, posters were proclaiming this research project.
Lytton’s willing submission: While preparing an edition of Lytton Strachey’s letters, Paul Levy, one of the trustees of Strachey’s estate, discovered just how far the sadomasochistic practices of Strachey and Senhouse had gone in the last years of Strachey’s life. He discovered a letter—apparently not found or possibly neglected by Michael Holroyd in his research—in which Strachey lovingly assures Senhouse that the wound to his abdomen sustained during a ritual crucifixion was healing well. See the introduction and the 1930 letters in The Letters of Lytton Strachey, edited by Paul Levy.
misogynistic gay theorist: For more on this, see Moffat, A Great Unrecorded History.
“When I go to what”: Woolf to Ethel Smyth, August 15, 1930, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, p. 200.
Vita Sackville-West: Many books of letters and memoirs and commentary, plus a number of novels, have been published about Vita Sackville-West. The most important work probably is still her younger son Nigel Nicolson’s Portrait of a Marriage (New York: Atheneum, 1973). In his introduction Nicolson divulged for the first time to the general public what had been well known to the world of London letters and the diplomatic corps—namely, that his parents were happy in their marriage while each engaged in a long series of same-sex affairs. Nicolson was painfully honest in discussing how his parents’ marital arrangements affected the lives of himself and his elder brother. The rest of the book consists of the secret account his mother had written about her passionate love affair with Violet Trefusis. Nicolson found this document among Vita’s papers after her death and decided to make it public. In my research I was interested to read several books by Trefusis, who mainly published in French, including her 1935 novel Broderie anglaise, which offers a transposed version of her love triangle with Vita and Virginia; in it, Vita appears as a male. For a careful and truthful account of the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, I refer my reader to Hermione Lee’s biography of Woolf, notably Chapter 28, “Vita.”
Eddy, not Vita: Edward Sackville-West, as a visit to the castle makes clear, had no love for Knole and no desire to live there. He took one turret of the great place for himself and decorated it to his taste, and, at least to me, his apartments and the marvelous deer park are the star attractions at Knole. Vita may have mourned Knole, but the home she and Harold created at the equally ancient ruin at Sissinghurst, now set in the extraordinary garden Vita created with Harold’s assistance, is far more beautiful. At Sissinghurst, Vita chose to live separate from her family and her servants in an extremely inconvenient tower, which, unlike cousin Eddy’s, seems made for one person, not for parties. In France, Violet Trefusis had a tower too.
“With a soft, wet warm”: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, p. 248.
“talking as loud as”: Ibid., p. 36.
Memoirs of Ellen Terry: Ibid., p. 271.
; their theatrical projects: The best account of Ellen Terry and her daughter, Edy Craig, is still that given by Michael Holroyd in A Strange Eventful History. More recently, his book has been fleshed out and vividly illustrated by Anne Rachlin, in Edy Was a Lady: Featuring the “Lost” Memoirs of Ellen Terry’s Daughter Edith Craig, with a foreword by Sir Michael Holroyd and with a message from Sir Donald Sinden, CBE (Leicester, UK: Matador, 2011).
“Miss Craig,” “a rosy”: Entry for March 30, 1922, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, p. 174.
“She put down her case”: Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (New York: Harcourt, 1941), p. 210.
called homophrosyne: I am grateful to Daniel Mendelsohn and his book An Odyssey: A Father, a Son,and an Epic (London: William Collins, 2017) for this word.
“Dearest, I want to tell”: Hermione Lee, in Virginia Woolf, gives a full and deeply moving account of the last days of Virginia Woolf. The final letter to Leonard is quoted in full on p. 747.
Epilogue: The Bell Children and Their Aunt
“Darling Angelica”: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, pp. 55 and 173.
gang-raped by older boys: See Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 292.
“The music consisted”: Bell, Bloomsbury Recalled, p. 34.
“There is a considerable”: Trinity College Library, Cambridge, Bell Archive, Box 6.
Gerald Wellesley: Gerald Wellesley was the husband of Dorothy Wellesley, who was a patron of the Hogarth Press and a close friend of Vita Sackville-West.
relevant to our world today: I wrote these last pages in the days following the testimony of Christine Blaney Ford before the Senate Judiciary Committee, charged with determining whether Judge Brett Kavanaugh should be seated on the Supreme Court of the United States. Professor Blaney Ford claimed that Kavanaugh had attempted to rape her during a party when they were teenagers. Kavanaugh passionately denied the accusation and was duly confirmed.