Adeline

by Norah Vincent

  Well, not by all. Not overlooked by all, but by the shrewder ones, surely, the most learned progressives, like himself, for whom a premise is a premise like it or not, and its conclusion inexorable. Not that this “problem,” call it, of how money works in the real world takes the form of a syllogism. Far from it. It is more like the problem of the missing mass, which academic friends of friends in the field have only begun to whisper about in circles, and frown.

  It is not at all formulated, this notion, especially in his outsider’s understanding—he won’t yet write it down—but for his purposes it works. The new physics, the new economics, stymied alike by inconsistency. Mass or the masses, same difficulty, neither the universe nor the populace behaves predictably. They don’t compute.

  It is just the kind of argument they always had as undergraduates at Cambridge, and still do when they gather, smoking and drinking, shouting over each other and dissolving in fits of affectionate laughter. He has kept them all very close—Strachey, Keynes and Forster in particular—because he has never found anything to equal the pleasure or intelligence of their company, and the reminder they give of how it was to be truly intellectual and young and eager to change the world. Stephen, too—Virginia’s brother Thoby—would have remained one of his closest confidants from those days had he not died of typhoid so tragically young.

  These college men are all that save Leonard from the drab realities of his agitant life. It irritates him just to think of them, the true believers. These horrid little hobgoblins of the movement are a plague to him, a threat to the viability of the Left, to which he is giving his lifeblood. They are a grim and tedious lot, the Leninist cortege, as he has dubbed them, with their red kerchiefs flying and their manifestos clutched to their breasts, trudging all the way from the Finland Station to Finchley Station, spouting the creed of their dead savior without so much as stumbling over the pitfalls of common sense. They are puritanical idiots to a one, dried up, dreary monomaniacs who don’t have the brains among them to see that they have simply substituted one apotheosis for another.

  “Your messiah,” he so often wants to shout at them, “has simply trimmed his beard.”

  Humorless, cultureless, imaginationless, they are a breathing contradiction in terms. But then, he supposes, he is hardly different, or has become so, even if, in his case, it has all been whiskeyed and watered down to a kind of acceptable upper-crust socialism. Strachey—or Lytton, as he more often calls him now that Virginia has mostly rid them all of the habit of calling their former schoolmates by their surnames (he must remind himself more often with Keynes and Forster to call them Maynard and Morgan)—Lytton calls him the armoire revolutionary.

  “There you are, dear liar,” he teases, his distinctive castrato voice emanating from deep within the immense russet curtain of his beard, “sitting safe within the walls of your bought privilege, thinking the thoughts, writing the screeds that only the fed, housed, rested and leisured can possibly indulge.”

  It is all infuriatingly true, but in Lytton’s mouth it also manages to be very amusing. He and Lytton, at least, can argue it through the way he likes to, half in earnest, half tongue in cheek, and this is as indispensable to Leonard now as it has always been. His sanity depends on it. Lytton’s wonderful feistiness, combined with his penchant for never taking anything too seriously, can encompass it all quite amicably. This helps Leonard to maintain the perspective he needs; the view that so many of his colleagues pointedly lack.

  He remembers that he had actually said something along these lines to Lytton not a week ago. They had been in Lytton’s study at his newly acquired retreat, Ham Spray, lounging after dinner, just the two of them, a lesson in contrasts. There was Lytton, pale as a statue, bespectacled and languid as ever, reclining with a crumbling mid-nineteenth-century edition of Julius Caesar in his hand, from which he had been reading aloud. Then there was Leonard, Sephardic, sharp-featured and irascible, crouching on a footstool like a crow. They had segued jaggedly from the heights of Mark Antony’s funeral oration to Leonard’s far less lofty political preoccupations.

  “The insufferable irony of it has been there from the start,” Leonard had wailed, which, as usual, had only made Lytton squirm with glee at the prospect of yet another opportunity to needle his old friend for being such a fussbudget. “Marx in the British Museum library, comfortably immured in the embrace of an empire”—Lytton had raised his eyebrows at this, but Leonard had ignored it—“what a farce. There he was, kicking holes in his sanctuary, which, of course, speak of the bloody devil, profit and exploitative labor had built. Can these Bolsheviks not see this?”

  “My dear boy,” Lytton had drawled wearily, “once upon a time you could not see it either, or have you forgotten already the errors of your morbid youth?” He cleared his throat archly here, in the Strachey way, to suggest that perhaps not all of these errors were entirely or so far in the past.

  “Yes, yes,” Leonard had stammered, “but—”

  “But,” Lytton had interrupted, putting an enragingly pedantic emphasis on the t and then leaving the rest of his objection to make itself.

  Leonard smiles thinking of it now, how easily Lytton has always been able to rile him, because he knows him too well, and because, as he had always done so effectively among the Apostles, Lytton could devastate a foolish conceit with a single word and leave them all roaring.

  And so, now, with the same damning terseness, there is Lytton’s “but”—they would have laughed, too, over this pun—hanging there, posing the question that is too obvious to need asking outright. Marx, it says. Yes him. But you? What about you? After all, as you yourself have just been so clever as to point out, what could be more bourgeois than scholarship?

  “Days and luxurious days of it,” he hears Lytton saying, rolling his outstretched hand through the air, “in the quiet of the cordon sanitaire.”

  In short, Leonard’s life. And in Sussex, no less. Social justice. “Pah,” Lytton had scoffed by way of conclusion. And, of course, he was right, Leonard thinks now, a little defensively. A fool’s errand run by a hypocrite. And yet, he would run it all the same, even as Lytton laughed.

  Yes, it is all so useless and absurd, he concedes, and all the more so because he proceeds, knowing this, but refusing, purely for the sake of his Jew’s conscience—is that it?—to quit. There, at least, is a guilt he can quantify: “And how like a Jew of you to think so,” he can hear some Tory prig griping. But he does not even twist his lips at such remarks anymore. They are too ingrained, as old as the old religion itself, and the mind of Europe, which, he knows from experience, has been jaundiced for almost as long.

  He is what he is and will always be, a Hebrew who got in, as the dons at Trinity no doubt used to put it, muttering to each other over tea. The others, his adopted (or was it adopting?) group, the whip-tongued gentiles of the university, are what they essentially are, too—inveterate anti-Semites to the core—and always will be, though they have been made less rudely aware of it. Even Virginia, as well as Thoby, of course, had been tarnished in the same way by their parents’, by their whole people’s, views on the subject. Lytton, too, carries it still, as so many Englishmen of his class and upbringing do, in the same rear pocket as his misogyny, his pederasty and the remnant sting of the lash on his backside.

  “Coins of the realm, I’m afraid,” some helpful schoolmaster had once told Leonard when he was just a boy starting out, trying to make his way, an outlander at home, held apart among the main. All these years and a world war later, he knows that this is still the case.

  Anglo-Saxons are a tribal people, he thinks sourly, however hyphenated their provenance. No escaping it. They drink, they dine, they remain faintly dismayed by his presence—the nostrils at times give this away. They poke fun as only the English can, relentlessly, good-naturedly, without saying a word—or not one to the purpose. That would be rude, naturally. Not cricket.

  But beneath it all, their acid presumption runs. He has no trouble imagini
ng the scene, played out in a thousand drawing rooms across the land, drawing rooms that are exactly like so many of those he has been in and left, with the subtle dusting of racial distaste on his shoulders. He can see it now, the pudding-faced, public-schooled country squire in his quintessential milieu, standing by the fire in his plus fours, leaning on the mantel, riding crop raised in his hand, making it plain, at last, in unmixed company:

  “The secular Jew is the ideal revolutionary, always has been. He is, by nature, a money-grubbing, sanctimonious intellectual. He can’t help it. But now, with his side locks and his yarmulke thrown off, he must put his obsessions somewhere. In place of his Torah and his dead God, he has put his Kapital and his higher cause. And what—can you guess—is this newfangled Shylock’s one unshakable belief? What is the great insidious truth and solution that has squirmed out of this wily bookworm’s brain and is now oozing its way across the civilized world? Why, of course, that wealth must right the wrongs of history.”

  Leonard catches himself sharply on the end of this, snapping the ruler against the desk and groaning to himself: Oh, leave off, can’t you? But he does not have Lytton’s gift for levity.

  And he can’t leave it, of course, because at bottom he is that same godless Jew who can’t help himself. Yet he is also the establishment, or the product of it. He was schooled among these landed Philistines. No wonder, then, he can neither leave well enough alone nor break free. He is much too high-winded to shut up. And so he keeps on, being himself, slipping, ever the wily Jew, through the loopholes in his contradictions while sidestepping his abiding self-contempt.

  He talks to himself like this half the day, every day, round and round, full of debate, half abashed, half thrilled by his insights, which he then scrupulously writes down. How clever, says the wordy boxer in his brain, patting himself on the back for a stout showing. But the rest of him is there, too, shamed by the rebutting punch, bent around the better man’s fist.

  Even Lytton would not say it quite this way—there is too much fondness between them—but he implies as much, and Leonard puts it to himself in the harshest terms in his own voice. Useless, it says, pathetic, one more sedentary snob lip-serving the cause of the common man for the sake of his own self-image.

  He glares at the mess on his desk, the papers, the paper clips, the pens, the books, the ashtrays, the pipes, the pale blue stationery, all the twee accoutrements of his class and lifestyle, and observes caustically: This whole ridiculous midden is all just more rubbish to the rubbish collector in the street, and rightly so. Too bloody rightly so.

  Ah, well, he sighs, stretching his arms above his head and lightening slightly. It doesn’t matter. So what if none of these mock-heroic struggles on paper will make the slightest difference? Who cares if none of this will be taken seriously by anyone other than my debate society friends, or remembered by anyone at all? I could play table tennis all my days, I suppose, he thinks, and achieve the same result. Lytton would approve.

  He winces a little at the defeatism in this, but then smiles again, remembering, after all, how Lytton did once phrase it.

  “You’re stuck with it, I’m sorry to say, Woolf, as trying as it can be—and, heavens, don’t I know it—but it’s simply how you think.”

  Lytton had paused here wryly, in his typical style, the great bush of his facial hair almost but not quite hiding the smirk that he could never deny himself.

  “This is the boring through-line of your mind, alas,” he’d said drolly, rubbing his hands along his thighs. “Which is, by the way, boring in both senses—dull and skewering.”

  This last bit was yet another set piece of Lytton’s delivery, the kind of parenthetical aside he always threw in, a grace note to the main dig, because it delighted them both. Leonard had giggled, as usual, at Lytton’s flirtatious way, though he had done so, also as usual, with misgivings, because he had known that this was not an attitude or a sound he could reproduce under any other circumstances. Not even with Virginia.

  It was theirs alone, his and Lytton’s, one of many small but precious vulnerabilities they shared. He’d let these tender intimacies stand, because they had done so for such a long time, and because he needed to maintain in adult life the kind of closeness with another man that he had so enjoyed in his youth. But he did so now less easily than he once had, and against his wiser judgment. Every unguarded portion of himself leaves him more open to the ravages of loss.

  His feelings, he thinks, looking down again at his handiwork, are not like all these tables and charts and arguments, subject to his need for control. He can feel himself nearly choking on this reminder of love, as he hears Lytton’s jolly, lilting voice summing up “the fierce and lugubrious mind of the Woolf.”

  “Sorry, old man,” he’d said, at last setting aside his Julius Caesar with a sly grin. “But there’s just no stopping it. It’s like some heinous carnival spit, your brain, turning over and over the same charred carrion. Poor fellow. I do sympathize, but there it is.”

  It has always been a good joke, and a needed one, but it does not change the fact.

  Overriding it all, he hears his father chiding with his clarifying mind, as he so often did over supper with his wife and brood of nine sitting awed. It is his father’s blood ethic that boils in Leonard’s veins, forcing him back always to the same ideal, even while he sees through it.

  To concede failure, and so relatively early in life, that is a sin against suffering, surely? This is what he has always said in his own defense, and all teasing aside, it is a view Lytton, Keynes, Forster, Bell and all the others share. It is what defines them as a group, their belief, and their insistence, held over from the Apostles, but perfected in their soirées: Everyone must speak clearly and honestly always, saying precisely what he or she means, and only that. They—Bloomsbury, as they are called—have been abused by society’s dogs, branded as precious and self-indulgent aesthetes who are not in any way serious about real life. But this is untrue, philosophically and demonstrably untrue, and the lie of it makes him angry. Yes, they have had their sport, their fun-making, down-dressing and hoaxes, but they have never been frivolous or disinterested. They have always cared.

  What are people like him for, he has always said, if not for this? The effort, the attempt to work out in the closed room what has gone wrong in the trenches? Is this in no way laudable? He thinks of the many ifs this entails. Even if implementing all this higher good is just a dream, even if whatever paltry sand hill of progress he and his cohorts erect is sure to be swept away with the next war’s tide, and finally, even if entropy is the inescapable rule, who can live without illusion?

  He can’t.

  She can’t.

  For a moment, the thought of Virginia holds him suspended as he conjures up her face, with its looming-browed sleepwalker’s eyes, staring at him through the rushing hours of the day. No, she is not Lytton. She is not a man. She does not have a man’s conviction, his command, his stoic forbearance. But she has her own amalgamation—inventive, surprising, new—and he loves her for it all the same. It complements and comforts him in ways that Lytton and the others do not and cannot. Those eyes of hers have seen right the way through the kaleidoscope, well into the belly of illusion, but they have also seen too much of this world, which illusion cannot touch.

  Thinking this, he comes back to the day’s first notion—art as the beneficiary of businesses well run—and he adds to it something far more personal, the fruit of his current thinking. The role he plays in her life, and she in his. This morning, in the bath, he resented her privacy, her shutting him out, but now he asserts it in a different way, seeing that they are doing, each in his or her own idiosyncratic way, the same thing.

  Their life, their bond, their work and their circle of closely kept friends are about one thing: maintenance of the necessary illusion.

  It is what he does every day, for her and for himself, in order to go on. And she, in turn, does it for him and for herself for the same reason. And that is
also why she falls so hard when she falls, because she, too, knows that when the scrim falls away, all of their pondering and their ponderous scribbling is futile. At those times, she knows it better than he. But sometimes, in denial, or in the fury of her dream, she finds the strength to go on with the charade. For how long he cannot say, nor can she.

  It is the most tenuous strand between them, as well as the staunchest, the one they cannot break, however tortuously they twist it. It is also the only real argument they have—managing this sustaining falsehood—in a thousand times and forms, the same tug of war where neither stands nor falls, but both are dug in to the waist, resisting. In this, theirs is a marriage like all marriages, he presumes, an embattlement of foxholes. And the tether between? Well, he can’t help invoking Lytton again: “That is the free means of torture doled out with the vows. One is given just enough rope to harangue, but not to hang by.” That is the sum of it, hilarious and difficult, though his own way of putting it is, as usual, more sedate. Together they uphold a fantasy that upholds them both.

  The subject is inexhaustible. Marriage. It is on everyone’s mind, even—he smiles fondly—the filthy minds of buggers. He, accordingly, has put a great deal of thought into it. Marriage is a black box. Someone said that once. He cannot remember who. But it is true. So very true. No one else can know what goes on inside a couple’s life together, or untwine the cat’s cradle of intimacy that weaves between husband and wife. The couple themselves cannot really know, though daily their hands jigger the threads. They can know only in one sense, kinetically, habitually, as hands do, performing expertly and without thought a task they have repeated many times. But there remains the great riddle of personality, and how to domesticate it.

  This has always been of particular interest to Virginia in her work. It is the substance of Dalloway. How do you make romance into a way of life? Can you? Especially when there is so much confusion in what you feel. At times, thankfully, it can seem clear and singular, as when you are sitting in the parlor of an evening, smoking by the fire and thinking, I am content. But far more often it is mangled and alloyed, or it does not come through at all, because sorting out the junk heap of your heart is more than you can manage most days. So you leave it dark.