Adeline

by Norah Vincent

  About sex and sexuality in particular, there is not a thing in Freud that was not already in Shakespeare, and infinitely better said. (She still has not read Freud, but . . . ) What’s more, all of it, all this trickery of men and women, the Bard had debunked and dispensed with properly, in the context of the human travesty, not ululated it from the rooftops.

  This is her way—to make her comedy duck and bite—and she has made it do so. Orlando—Vita had been flattered by it, of course—is not a serious book. It is not even a flattering one, and certainly no hagiography of Vita, or some Sapphic fantasia clothed in the hoary verdigris of the peerage. Good God, what a thought. The morons have made her into a poster, and her most careless daubs, her palate cleansers, into shrines. She can only laugh, for Orlando is already her most popular book by far, though her least well written. But—fate be praised!—it has made her famous, which, of course, only makes her want to climb to the top of the nearest bell tower and bellow to all the riffraff below: I was teasing, you imbeciles. I was clearing my throat.

  Well, let them slurp and moan. She will not shave her head and play Joan of Arc to their sideshow—especially not on behalf of that spitcurled invert Radclyffe Hall, who had, it was true, been unjustly tried and convicted of obscenity in November for daring to write (talentlessly) of women in love. But that did not make her a saint, or Virginia her paladin.

  No. Shaw is for canonizing, if that’s your sport. Take his Joan and his tone, and let him orate as he would. The people’s playwright had been given (by his rankled compatriot Joyce, no less) his appropriate title, the Right Honorable Ulster Polonius. Wonderful, and perfect. Let him bask in his plastic laurels. She has no use for them.

  Yes, she had done her duty by Hall the previous fall, but against the abomination of censorship, not for the red herring of inversion. She had signed her worthy name to the sonorous letter of protestation penned by Morgan Forster and published in The Nation. She had even trudged to court to testify, if required. But, alas, she had been dismissed uncalled. The book had been banned with a single sweep of the berobed arm and a single indignant toss of the periwigged head. And the presiding buffoon? Ah, well, he had, no doubt, gone to school with Leonard and Lytton.

  Does this honestly make no one else laugh?

  In Orlando she had simply squibbed her own version of what Shakespeare had done. The more direct reference had been, of course, to Ariosto’s and Boiardo’s epic romances Orlando Furioso and Orlando Innamorato, but As You Like It was indubitably there in the fun, in the fungibility of sex and most of all in the mockery. She had shown, with the lightest of touches, much as the Bard had done, that all the obscenity in the world could be slipped past the groundlings with balderdash, and fall unnoticed into what Lytton called the “great chasm of sar” that forever yawned between the wit and the twit. She had parried their censorship.

  Could she make it any plainer? Not aloud.

  And then, of course, there is this, which is quite the funniest thing of all—and again, patent to all, but ignored, naturally. In England, the only mannishness is in women, and always has been, while all the most weedy, weak and wheedling of the lot are men, who are either fairies outright—the prettiest of them far outpouting and outrougeing the English rose—or are physically unfit in the soldier’s sense for much of anything but billiards and cards.

  If Queen Victoria was not a man, who was? And Elizabeth? Was it any wonder such strata of costume and makeup were required? And even then, she hardly outdid her attendant lords. When a smattering of the far-flung native peoples of the Americas were brought before the painted queen’s court to be ogled and probed, it must have been quite difficult for them to tell the sexes of these strange ornamented creatures apart. No doubt they resorted to their noses.

  And so it is with Vita, true to the aristocratic line, where it seemed that the titanic mustachioed women so often towered above their milquetoast men and outweighed them by fifty pounds. Surely this must have been the reason for the invention of the top hat, and come to think of it, the Victorian gentleman’s muttonchops—one could not, after all, be quite so outfaced by one’s queen.

  Oh, yes, yes, Vita’s retiring spouse Harold Nicolson is all right, the diplomat through and through, amenable, sensible, but with Vita, as meek and incumbent as his own mustache. Looking him over, one felt that one could take him in a scrap if it came to it. She laughs aloud thinking of it now: Vita in her breeches and high-laced boots, astride him on his back, pinning him with her knees and gagging him with a pendulous mouthful of her pearls until he gurgles his assent and agrees to let her ride him round the manor like a Shetland.

  That is Vita’s appeal. The size of her, the bones, the breasts, the breath of her, all outsized and smotheringly maternal in a faintly ursine way: She is powerful and blundering and all paws. And that, Virginia supposes, is what she needs from her. Vita will never be the originals, Julia and Nessa, or even come close. She is their overgrown and allowable imitation, fundamentally faute de mieux. Sleeping with Vita is as close as Virginia will ever come to sleeping with her mother and sister, or indeed with herself, all of which, she is not afraid to admit to herself, have been abiding fantasies, laid low and channeled elsewise all her life.

  Adeline is only her projection, little goat, and that is not the same. They cannot truly make love. Nessa, meanwhile, is all that is left of their mother. She is her blood, beautiful, adored, and inextricably grafted to Virginia’s soul, psychically Siamese. If she, Virginia, could have shot herself into Nessa’s veins, she would have done so long ago. But it is one of the things that is forbidden, and one of the very few such things about which she never jests.

  This, of course, is well, well beyond Sapphism and feminism. It is abomination indeed, that lowliest of loves that truly dare not speak its name, especially in a court of law. It has no proponents averring in the dock, as Wilde had done, or marching in the street with the suffragists. It has no one to rouse on its behalf, least of all her, yet it matters awfully. It is serious, but in it, as in all the best and most important things, she must be discontented with substitutes.

  Still, with Vita, the comparisons are not always so pale, for despite her outward mannishness, there is something saturatedly female about her, too. Not feminine, like Nessa, not in the least, but female, with all its attendant odors and flows which act on the brain as nature intended, by instinct. Vita smells and tastes of the sea and the soil. In Vita’s arms, Virginia inhales the musk and tidal essences of Earth, and she feels incarnate for the first time. She has only ever felt disembodied before.

  She had touched on this abstrusely in her lecture “Women and Fiction,” which like so much else had been the tamest version of her thoughts on the subject. She had written and spoken as expected, the advocate for her sex, by turns wry and flinty, but never strident per se. Oh, yes, it would be read and heard as such by the overstuffed boobs of the establishment. They would be provoked, but they would miss the subtext, as, in fact, would the bluestocking disciples she would, and had already, similarly inflamed. They were like an abjection of pilgrims (now there was a collective noun she could endorse) rushing up to the lectern to shake her hand, or barreling into teashops, to behold the blessed face of their paragon and touch the holy hem of her garment. Absurd.

  Yet, in one way, they were righter than they knew, for there was that inescapable resurrected quality about this Vita(l)ized Virginia Woolf, the original noli mi tangere, which, as of old, had always provoked its opposite. Do not touch, the risen Christ had warned, yet to Thomas he had said: Put your hand inside my wound and believe.

  It was the same, what she was doing with Vita, and indeed what all the Sapphists did, most of them unknowingly, reenacting this ritual whose significance they did not wholly understand: the wound where the doubter puts her hand. If that was not sex, what was?

  But there is more to it than that, and this she had said in her speech. The lack of identity was prime. She had said it was the anonymity of women who wrote, the
authoresses, Elizabethans and before, who had signed their poetry “Anon” because they did not have names. They did not exist. And yet their verses did exist. They themselves disappeared, however, as she did, in the very act of putting words on the page.

  A book is a fold of paper and thread, in itself inert, yet in the right hands, it transmits. In the mind of the reader, the hearer, the writing lives. The transference occurs, leaping from one mind to another over time and space and even death. Hence the anonymity of the authorial feat.

  And the sex. That is a kind of telepathy as well, achieved in the mind, between minds, and again, by means of primitive instruments. But only with women. A woman. Vita.

  With men, even Leonard, dear man, she had never been able to escape her paralytic horror of penetration, the awful sense of being impaled. This was rather the silly bit, though also the ineradicable—she cannot disembarrass the idiom—sticking point. Just at the critical moment, a gruesome image out of Ivanhoe (courtesy of Father’s library, no doubt, and the hours she had spent there as a child unsupervised, reading unsuitable material at far too young an age)—the sweat-streaked, torch-lit face of an infidel in his death agony ahoist on the crusader’s spear—would overtake her mind and obfuscate her senses such that she would undergo a kind of breathing rigor mortis that could not fail to repel even the most ardent of suitors.

  Try as she might, and she had tried mightily on her honeymoon, she could not help it. It was what she had done with her half brother George, of course, and after a time, even he had desisted, crying in despair, “Damn you, Ginia, you would make me a necrophile.” She had come across this root in her Greek, and noted it in her diary, preferring it thus, nekro, the k being rightly harsher than the c.

  But with Vita the act of love had changed, both in posture and, of course, anatomy, from one of penetration to one of reaching out, reaching in for the infusion of belief. They have reclined together for hours, Vita cradling, Virginia nestling in the supple comfort of Vita’s bosom. There is no mystery in this. Vita is mother, Virginia child. These roles are also inherent in Sapphism, she feels, and the substance of its appeal.

  And so they are incestuous in a sense, after all. Often, as they lie there, Vita reaching ever so tenderly and holding her inside, the pleasure and the sadness overtake, and Virginia weeps. Adeline weeps. And Vita soothes. And then they walk out into the world again separately with no trace of this strange communion on their faces.

  In January, she and Leonard, as well as Nessa (who is—can it be?—soon to be fifty years of age), Duncan Grant and Nessa’s middle son Quentin, had spent a week with Vita and Harold in Berlin, where Harold has been posted at the British embassy. It had been an awkward ménage, and in the end, the strain of it had made her ill. Upon returning home, she had been in a state of near-cataleptic infirmity for weeks. But while they had been there—what a saturnalia the city had become!—seeking refuge from the boysblush of buggers who had overtaken all the louchest Weimar bars and nightclubs, delirious with their sex and truffling every groin in sight, she and Nessa had had an abundance of time to themselves. They had spent a good deal of it walking in the city’s botanical gardens, thinking of home and talking of Vita, or, as they’d called it for lack of a more generous term, the ongoing liaison dangereuse that Virginia was having with La Sackville.

  “She is not your equal,” Nessa had said, meaning not what most Englishwomen would have meant by such a remark, that Vita is of blue blood and Virginia is not, but rather what the snobs of Bloomsbury meant, that Vita is qualitatively not up to snuff. That is to say, in magnitude of mind, soul and sensibility, she is deficient; she lacks gravitas.

  But Nessa is not one of Bloomsbury’s snobs. She is not normally so judgmental, or not at least when it comes to what are arguably extra-moral flaws in a person’s character. She requires people to be good, but she does not require them to excel. Virginia has never known Nessa to dash a person for being insufficient. And so, the fact that she had dashed Vita in precisely this way revealed everything about the threat that Vita represented to her, and to her umbilical bond with Virginia, which had never been encroached upon in the least, even by Leonard.

  “Need she be?” Virginia had replied archly, leaving aside for the moment the import of what had been said.

  “I will not have her trifling with you,” Nessa had carped, again, with an unusual flare of temper.

  “And what if I am trifling with her?”

  “You are trifling with her—that is obvious—and she with you, but you will be hurt in the end all the same. You always are, and it is not good for you.”

  “Oh, you! Always the sentinel. So strict. Yet you know as well as I that every contact has its price. Would you have nothing touch me?”

  “Yes, every contact does have its price, but you are more vulnerable than most, and some contacts carry much higher prices than others.” Nessa had paused here to groan irritably, then added, “Always, always, these are the ones you seek out. Really, must I remind you?”

  “I do not need reminding.”

  “You do.”

  “Let it be, will you, dearest?” Virginia had pleaded. “This once.”

  “Not when the threat to you is so great. Vita has the power to destroy you.”

  “Come now, don’t be sensational. You have just said that she is not my equal.”

  “Yes, which is what makes her all the more dangerous. She acts according to her whims and without a care for consequence. She is a great lady, after all. She was brought up to do as she likes, and to consign whatever results to the realm of common things that are not her business.”

  Turning on Nessa, Virginia had asserted, “You are jealous of Vita.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “You are.”

  After a pause, Nessa had meekly replied, “And what if I were? Would that discount what I have just said?”

  “No,” Virginia had sighed in defeat.

  “Well then,” Nessa had concluded, throwing her hands out in front of her and opening them wide, palms up, in the gesture of someone who has won her point. After a strained pause she had added, “You think that you love her, of course.”

  “Oh, Nessa, love is not the word. The Greeks had so many words for love, and yet they could not exhaust its meaning. We have only one, and so much the poorer we. But in the language of love we are all poor. Even if we had as many words for love as the Inuit are reputed to have for snow, or indeed”—here, she had looked up at the overcast sky—“the Englishman has for rain, they would all still be inadequate.”

  “We are not in England,” Nessa had teased.

  “No,” Virginia had replied. “Alas, we are in Gomorrah.”

  This had made them both giggle.

  “Were the Cities of the Plain so full of flowers as this, do you suppose?” Nessa had said, looking around.

  “Undoubtedly. The real paradise lost. Narcissi, narcissi everywhere, and the bee-besotting orchid spread a thousandfold.”

  Here they had fallen down in another fit of the giggles on a plot of open grass beside a carp pond. Recovering themselves in little gasps of spent laughter, they had lapsed into a dream state and sat for some time without speaking, watching the cream-and-gold-colored creatures dart back and forth in the murky water, and surface occasionally to part their puffed and greedy lips in the hope of some reward.

  At last, Virginia had broken the silence. “I cannot say it any better. I’m sorry. But I do so love you, Nessa.”

  Nessa had fixed her then with her powerful grey eyes, which the grey day had made shine dully—like drops of pewter—and glow with unbearable solidity and warmth.

  “I know, my love,” she’d said. “I know.”

  June 1929

  IT IS SUMMER again, and there is nowhere else to be but in the garden at Monk’s House, communing with the sun and the flowers and the air and a dear friend whom one must now begin to criticize. Lytton is sitting beside Virginia on the wooden bench at the edge of the bowling green. He co
uld not be induced to play a game. He is too feeble, never much one for games, and they laugh about this as they sit, content, as they have always been, to talk instead.

  Lytton is his usual gentle, drape-bearded, bespectacled self, with his long strands of thin hair parted far to the side, creamed flat across the top of his head and around his ears. He is wearing a beige lambswool cardigan vest under a brown tweed jacket, a perfectly knotted and dimpled cornflower-blue tie and white flannel trousers with a pair of white buckskin shoes. For him, he is dressed for summer, on the bottom half at least.

  He has always had what they have in recent years come to refer to as a Proustian constitution: always susceptible to chills and maladies and even loud noises. He has lived much of his life reading in a supine position. It is not at all unusual for him to wear such heavy clothing in the warm months of the year, or to see him sitting outdoors when the weather is fine with a blanket thrown over his lap. But today, Virginia notes, he does seem a touch thinner and frailer than usual.

  Virginia is draped for the weather in a long white cotton frock with a wide band of delicate sky-blue striping along the hem. She has a light linen shawl thrown loosely over her shoulders, and she is wearing a wide-brimmed black straw sun hat, topped on one side with a jaunty white spray of tulle.

  They have been sitting this way in silence for several minutes, basking in the smell of fresh cut grass and fecund soil and the haven of the shade, when Lytton breaks in, as only he can, with the softest yet most sparing of assertions.

  “So, I suppose we must have it out, then?” he says.

  “Out?” Virginia coyly demurs. “About what, dearest?”

  “Elizabeth and Essex, of course. You didn’t like it.”

  “Nonsense,” she says. “I have criticisms. That’s all. I’d say my feelings are much the same as yours were about Dalloway. One can take issue with the particulars of a work, or the bringing off of it, but one can do so within the context of a broader recognition of the overall achievement, don’t you agree?”