Deceived With Kindness

by Angelica Garnett

  In those days children saw less of their parents than they do now, and it seems that Julia was often absent from home on visits to relations. One has the impression of someone with a very firm sense of what was most important in life, valuing devotion and responsibility, only running away from them when they threatened to overcome her. She had a compelling, even dominating personality, and ran the household in a mood that may, one feels, have been a trifle tense. In spite of her underlying sadness, she could hold an audience spellbound and make them laugh. At times, she was tempted to direct the lives of others, performing charitable works and occasionally indulging in matchmaking. Anything but flirtatious or flighty, she aroused the passions of James Russell Lowell, the American author and at that time Ambassador, which were extinguished only with her death. And it was she alone who could command the obedience of J. K. Stephen, her husband’s nephew, when he lost his mental equilibrium.

  For Vanessa she remained a glamorous figure, authoritative and romantic, rustling in silk and for ever active, running from top to bottom of the house, or sitting, grave and concentrated, in silent communion with her husband in the drawing-room. Although she was only to know her mother for a bare fifteen years, the aura with which she surrounded Julia may have owed some of its magic to the fact that she did not survive into Vanessa’s adolescence. She remained mysterious, deeply loved but scarcely understood.

  After the death of Julia, and of her stepsister Stella shortly afterwards, Vanessa’s sense of maternal responsibility, already forced into precocious maturity, became a vulnerable point in her make-up. Left exposed as the one who was expected to take charge of the large and – by our standards – formal household, she was obliged to account for every penny, week by week, to her persistent and guilt-ridden father.

  If Leslie Stephen seemed relentless it was not because he was, in reality, insensitive or unimaginative, but with his unbalanced image of himself, he had little idea of the effect he produced on young and tender natures. Always prone to the purple passages of emotional self-indulgence, he was, in spite of the sense of proportion that emerges from his writing, thrown into an excess of self-pity by his wife’s death. One must, however, remember that this was the second such occasion in his life, and that he was now well beyond middle age. As a widower he found himself face to face with duties that had previously been carried out by Julia. It was she who at his request had held the purse-strings and now, after Stella’s death, and though she lacked experience, he felt that Vanessa would take charge of them. His groans of despair and peculiar system of accounting resulted from a feeling of rage that fate should aim, at this stage, to transform him into a responsible adult, and his resentment was directed against Vanessa, as the representative of her mother, who had so selfishly deserted him on the threshold of old age. But he had not reckoned on a character protected from emotional blackmail by an inner wisdom and an absent-minded dreaminess that saw through his intentions. Outwardly insulated though she was, however, Vanessa’s task was no less of a burden – and these scenes left in her mind a residue of intense dislike, owing to the pain of seeing her father behave in a way she could not respect. It may have been this impression that clarified her own attitude to money; in later life she gave with generosity and never attached conditions to the gift. If this was a reaction to Leslie’s hysteria, it was an admirable one.

  On the whole it was only when Leslie’s egotism became uppermost that he aroused feelings of antagonism. When his children were small he identified with at least some of their interests – their opinions of what they read, their sailing boats in Kensington Gardens, and their fondness for butterflies and dogs. He observed his children’s differing personalities, and as their minds developed they came to appreciate his honesty, integrity and unworldliness: whether they realised it or not they adopted many of his values. Vanessa greatly admired his rejection of Christian belief, which seemed to her both courageous and clear-headed: she admired and was seduced by the rationalist point of view, to which she accorded an importance in inverse ratio to the strength of her own emotions.

  None the less, in a family that was highly articulate and self-conscious, Vanessa held herself a little apart, perhaps because she was the eldest. Her reactions were slower and more instinctive than Virginia’s – possibly more so than Thoby’s – and she often preferred to maintain a mute independence which impressed the more volatile Virginia with a sense of strength and responsibility. Vanessa was teased by the others for her silences but they were an indication of what lay beneath, almost like a piece of semi-opaque glass let into the floor through which, when the light was favourable, one might be lucky enough to glimpse things usually hidden. One of these was her shy determination to be a painter, the other her capacity for deep feeling, in which she herself may have found something disconcerting and even frightening. The whole cast of her mind, unenquiring and passive, was opposed to analysis: unlike Virginia, she never learnt to project the light of self-questioning onto her own behaviour. Instead she clung to a hope that all problems could be solved by rationalising them, and that there was somewhere a perfect system that would do away with threatening or painful situations.

  In spite of her superiority of years and experience it was from her sister that Vanessa often felt the need to protect herself. While still a child Virginia, possessed of precocious insight, christened Vanessa ‘the saint’, knowing that such a nickname would embarrass Vanessa by its suggestion of disingenuous self-righteousness, one of the favourite targets of the younger members of the family. Virginia, though far from heartless, could seldom resist exhibiting her cleverness, winning for herself a reputation for brilliance as well as untrustworthiness, whereas Vanessa particularly prided herself on her reliability. It was with reservations that Vanessa showed Virginia her most intimate feelings, never sure of how they would be handed back to her, or of the form in which they might reach other people. In spite of this, however, and even in homage to her sister’s insight and intelligence, it was to her that Vanessa revealed her early ambitions. On this level, even if subject to a natural sense of rivalry, Virginia’s reactions were generous.

  Vanessa, Stella and Virginia, 1896

  Apart from such rivalry, however, there was the unfortunate tendency, prevalent among most Stephens, to feel inadequate, not so much in the face of life as of other people. Standing beside Vanessa, Virginia felt unworthy of her, and it was perhaps specially difficult for her, strong in intellect, but weaker in the more traditional feminine qualities, to accept the part assigned them by their mother. Although their home was governed by a woman – one might say, because of this fact – it was organised in favour of man: in Julia’s mind women were, if not slaves, doomed to serve their better halves. Her daughter Stella, who adored her, led the life of a nun, crushed and subservient – and had Julia survived she would have undoubtedly taken it for granted that her other two daughters should put love and service first. As it was, practically uneducated, and considered to be of less importance than their brothers, who were sent to boarding school, they remained at home. Vanessa, the more domesticated of the two, fitted better into what was expected of them, and this Virginia envied. She herself seemed to have no such role to play, and in consequence felt excluded and angry. Refusing to be relegated to the limbo of the misunderstood and neglected, she protested, feeling herself torn between resentment and admiration of her sister. On her side Vanessa was conscious that the situation was no fault of hers – and withstood the attacks in silence and with dignity, even when Virginia’s tongue, with unerring intelligence, struck at her most vulnerable parts.

  There was another source of envy, very natural in sisters so close to each other with one adored brother between them. As the two eldest, Thoby and Vanessa had been as thick as thieves, until Virginia, enlightened by her sense of inferiority and unfairness, realised how entrancing their relationship was and, jealous of both, insinuated herself into Thoby’s affections. He, a manly schoolboy and budding intellectual, probably taught
both sisters much in different ways, though one would judge – merely from looking at his photograph – that he was secretive and inhibited. Vanessa probably enjoyed his nascent masculinity and gave him in return her motherly advice and protection, while with Virginia he discussed ideas and literature. Though apparently unconcerned, Vanessa now found herself for the first time a victim of sisterly competition.

  Vanessa was fifteen when her mother died, after some weeks of illness – she was forty-nine. She looked far older, worn out not only by a life of service to others but also, one is tempted to think looking at the later photographs, from an indefinable inner anguish. When two years later, after a few months of marriage, Stella died, the family was doubly bereft, while the display of extreme emotion indulged in by Leslie brought his children together in a common dislike of hypocrisy. It was now that Vanessa was forced to shoulder the burden of Virginia’s early breakdowns when, even though other friends were concerned, it was to Vanessa that Virginia looked first and foremost for support and encouragement. For many years Vanessa wrote to Virginia every day of her life, and though no doubt we miss many of the overtones of a spirit that was predominantly ironic, the prevailing mood was one of tactful concern. Virginia learnt to rely on a constant sense of sympathy, while Vanessa miraculously maintained an affectionate humour without which Virginia would never have listened to her. Vanessa came to symbolise, even more than she had always done, reassurance and stability; Virginia clung to her with the desperation of one who feels threatened. It was an attitude which caught at Vanessa’s most vulnerable point, and confirmed a relation which in time became something of a stranglehold.

  Virginia’s feelings for Vanessa were two-fold: love, admiration and understanding played their part but were inextricably mixed with jealousy and envy, stimulated by Vanessa’s cool detachment and evident if unconscious superiority. With the years Virginia built up a fictional personality for Vanessa, in an effort to reduce those characteristics she found too disturbing, while emphasising others which to Vanessa herself seemed absurdly irrelevant. In a letter written many years later, Vanessa says, ‘I explained how Virginia since early youth has made it her business to create a character for me according to her own wishes and has now so succeeded in imposing it upon the world that the preposterous stories are supposed to be true because so characteristic ...’ Although Vanessa talks of this character, she does not substantiate or describe it. But it was a bogey to her, one which she felt powerless to counteract. Virginia herself admits to creating the image in this letter to Duncan Grant of 1917: ‘… indeed one of the concealed worms of my life has been a sister’s jealousy – of a sister I mean; and to feed this I have invented such a myth about her that I scarce know one from t’other.’

  It was not only the falsity of this character, so brilliantly and ruthlessly improvised by Virginia for her own ends, that Vanessa found inadmissible. She half-suspected her friends of finding it more amusing and attractive than the real thing, and could not dismiss the possibility that they might be right – indeed there were moments when she felt that she herself hardly knew what the real thing was. She found herself in a position of hopeless resistance because Virginia’s need to destroy – albeit by an act of creation – was stronger than her own means of self-protection: she was, to all intents and purposes, paralysed. Jockeyed by Virginia into the role of eternal mother, oracle and protector, she felt extraordinarily ill at ease, as though put into a strait-jacket. Although she had helped to cut it out herself, it was a garment that soon ceased to fit and that she longed to forget: it was difficult to forgive a sister who, she felt, should have been more perceptive, and more considerate. Thus Virginia’s egotism and Vanessa’s passivity contributed towards a situation that was, like some illnesses, chronic.

  For reasons that resembled Virginia’s sense of abandonment, but with a deeper reluctance to surrender to them, Vanessa was self-reliant almost to a fault, producing an effect of rocklike stability that was not as secure as it seemed. For the rest of her life she spent a large part of her energy in creating and maintaining a circle of safety, within which she could gather together all the elements she most loved and depended on. Her mother’s early death may well have stimulated a fear of the outside world and a deep need of family life. It probably made her wary of contracting relationships further afield, and her first love affair, almost certainly unconsummated, was with her brother-in-law Jack Hills, recently widowed by the death of Stella. At the time, marriage between brother and sister-in-law was prohibited, and although it could have been legally sanctioned abroad, the attraction was not strong enough to withstand the disapproval of Stella’s relatives, including her elder brother George. It died a natural death, and Vanessa waited a further seven years before allowing herself to be tempted into marriage.

  Although Vanessa was unequivocally feminine, she was never the kind of woman around whom men cluster. There was an elemental quality in her sexuality by which men were either seduced or alarmed. She refused to capitulate to the values of the social set to which her half-brother George tried to introduce her. Most of the women there either hid their sexual aspirations behind a barrier of puritanism, which seemed to Vanessa purely hypocritical, or openly traded them for material and social advantages. Unworldly and lacking in social savoir faire, she found herself in opposition to both sexes. Full of unspoken criticism, she was disinclined to spend her energy on small talk and gave the impression of being unapproachable, an impression reinforced by the rather withdrawn expression on her face. Among those with whom she had little in common this attitude formed a barrier, threatening to turn her into that puzzling thing, a lovely woman who does not want to be attractive. When George insisted on taking her out to dinner parties, she remained aware that none of his friends would ever make a husband for her – not even Joseph Chamberlain, with whom to her relief she was able to carry on an after-dinner conversation about butterflies.

  Meanwhile she profited from and greatly enjoyed her years as a student at the Academy Schools, which confirmed her sense of vocation as a painter, providing her at the same time with a refuge from a home dominated by a frail and elderly father, whose behaviour, sometimes painfully ridiculous, became less and less easy to put up with. In 1904, after a long illness, he died, and the younger part of the family removed to Bloomsbury.

  Here at last, having spent most of her life immersed in a literary atmosphere, Vanessa felt free to express herself. Her easel painting already showed the sense of equilibrium which remained one of her most personal qualities, while for the first time interior decoration became a practical possibility. At last the restrictions of convention could be swept aside and her mind and heart concentrated on painting. To see her in later life, brush in hand, was to see her happy, and to think of her without her painting would be to take away half her reason for living. No other activity or relationship gave her quite that kind of happiness: with children or lovers there was always an element of anxiety whereas while she was painting, though difficulties seemed insuperable, she could afford to forget herself and attain a degree of absorption which made her feel immune to anguish.

  With Thoby at Cambridge Vanessa came to know a number of his friends, among them Clive Bell. Vivacious, amusing and somewhat of a libertine, Clive came from a family of nouveaux riches whose extreme conventionality had driven him to escape first to university and then to Paris. A young man of some experience, he was overcome by just that air of mystery in Vanessa which her brother George’s friends found too much for them. He fell in love while she was still living at Hyde Park Gate, but though his feelings were at first unreciprocated he persevered and, after her removal to Bloomsbury, continued to see a great deal of her.

  In 1906 Vanessa, Virginia, Thoby, Clive and other friends went for a holiday to Greece, and on their return Thoby fell ill with an infection that was not immediately diagnosed. By the time the doctor had recognised it as typhoid, it was too late, and Thoby, considered by all his friends as a brilliant and promising yo
ung man, died at twenty-six – almost the same age as Stella. Two days later Vanessa accepted Clive’s proposal of marriage.

  No doubt Vanessa had turned to Clive as one of her brother’s most intimate friends. Her need of him may well have been impelled by the same need of identification that led to her falling in love with Jack Hills on the death of Stella. But whether this was true or not, she and Clive shared the same sense of shock, and the mutual attraction that accompanied it was natural enough – an attraction that had after all been simmering for some time.

  Initially their union was a great success. She was twenty-eight and had waited a long time for sexual experience. Now that it had come, she was transfigured; she was bowled over not only by sex itself but by the intimacy it conferred on their relationship. All her tender, delicate and most endearing qualities came to the surface; she teased, joked and laughed, enjoying the half-private, half-public parade of their feelings for each other. In addition, she soon found she was pregnant: in 1908 her elder son Julian was born.

  It was during this supremely happy and fulfilled period that Virginia took it into her head to flirt with Clive, an act which paralleled in its incestuous nature that of Vanessa falling in love with Jack Hills. But its character was entirely different. Vanessa’s feelings had, one may imagine, been prompted by despair at losing her sister and a desire to identify with her through the loved one by means of sexual attraction, whereas Virginia’s feelings for Clive were barely sexual, and owed much of their vivacity to a common delight in the processes of the intellect. Both he and she were carried away by a youthful effervescence which ignited a whole train of intellectual fireworks in a style that was not in Vanessa’s nature. Clive’s manner, though flattering and suggestive, carried with it none of the undertones of feeling which would have frightened Virginia, but was exactly calculated to promote a flirtation which, as they must both have been aware, was outrageous in its apparent disregard of Vanessa’s existence.