From Vanessa’s conversation it soon became apparent that she still believed, as she always had, that subject and even motivation in art had no importance. Crucifixions and entombments, people being impaled or burnt alive, could be looked at for their abstract qualities alone, a blind eye turned to the human content, as well as to the stimulus derived from it that may have affected the artist. Some of this attitude was due no doubt to her dislike of looking at ‘horrors’, thus perhaps proving the contrary to what she held to be true. It was as though in refusing to see the message she was turning her back on the human element – picking out the currants and rejecting the cake. With Madonnas and children, or Susannah in the bath, she could see them as contemporary nursery or domestic subjects, while happily divesting them of their religion; though she didn’t deny that this was at the root of their inspiration, she still didn’t believe that it had any ‘real’ importance. She was unmoved by the fact that a lot of Bach’s music is literally figurative – that descending intervals describe the Virgin’s tears, or arpeggios the Sea of Galilee. Had one told her, she would have dismissed it as irrelevant. There was a split in her mind as to why things were done, and how; it did not occur to her that the one cannot exist without the other.
Apart from reading books by Virginia and some of her friends, Vanessa read little of what might be called literature – her tastes were almost ludicrously humble. She had read the classics in her youth, but apart from those evenings when she read them aloud to me, never looked into them again. She never read poetry, with the exception of Julian’s, and never the avant-garde or the esoteric; what really delighted her were the autobiographies she borrowed from the Lewes Library, written by those whose lives – on the whole unremarkable – disclosed some point of idiosyncratic interest, which amused and sometimes amazed her. She could hardly believe that an elderly lady could spend her life with a primitive tribe in Brazil, or that a married couple, living together, should nevertheless write to each other every day. Vanessa would report on her latest book with a wry humour that betrayed an unexpected interest in other human beings; and though her irony had a tendency to reduce them to little heaps of dust, like snuff, it was not without affection.
Vanessa never went for a walk. If she went out, it was either to shop in Lewes or to find a less familiar landscape for painting. She loved the pearly luminosity of the Sussex light, the pale gold of the stubble fields, the orange-roofed barns which stood in mysterious isolation, and the silver willows whose cool grey smudges relieved the dark, August green of ash or elm. Usually, however, she had no need to go further than the garden to find the perfect motif; she could be seen hovering peaceably in front of her easel, her dress protected by a flimsy French apron, her feet in flat-heeled espadrilles, and on her head a broad-brimmed hat to shade her eyes from the glare. Her presence was betrayed by a smell of oil and turpentine, the colour of her clothes merged into a background of bushes and flowers. Her hesitant, tentative movements recalled those of a sleepwalker or a snail, leaving in its wake a trail of silver.
The studio was the citadel of the house, the sanctuary in which I spent the most treasured hours of my life. It was here, basking in the atmosphere of hard work and concentration, that I felt the most important things would happen; I was a dragonfly that hovers, disappears and returns, a law unto itself. As in a hothouse, I was both protected and stimulated, without a shadow of responsibility. I can imagine nothing better than sitting on the studio floor engrossed in some manual occupation while those patient elders concentrated in their own dreamlike fashion on their art. I absorbed much in that atmosphere that I afterwards valued, aware that it was a privilege to have been there, but it was a little like giving a child strong alcohol – I was drunk with the attention bestowed on me and the expectation so strongly projected that I should behave like a grown-up, while at the same time everyone was ready to give in to my slightest whim. Two dovetailed attitudes were at work, the one born of a tolerance of childish behaviour, the other of a feeling that I should do better not to be a child at all.
At week-ends visitors filled the house: Clive’s friends, Lytton Strachey, Francis Birrell and Raymond Mortimer seldom came into the studio, considered by them, one gathered, as a playground where people made horrible messes, and from which pictures eventually emerged triumphant. Had it not been for these delectable results the painters would have been regarded as irresponsible, though one might have wondered if that remote though benign trio who spent their time sitting on the terrace in the sun smoking, reading the paper, and gossiping had any right to judge. They were rather like a chorus in an unexciting drama, reflecting on life as it went by, though failing – thankfully perhaps – to interpret its most poignant moments. They exuded a concentrated enjoyment, peculiarly masculine and somehow sacrosanct, as though, before sitting down, they had drawn a circle round themselves in the gravel. Sworn not to disturb them, I would slink past in sandals and sunbonnet to some private lair in the orchard, where their voices and laughter were just audible, a reassuring background to my own preoccupations. Once, when Vanessa was away, I cut myself on a new penknife. Feeling that I was prizing him out of a honeyed retreat, I was obliged to go to Clive for help. He was sufficiently concerned to come with me to wash and bind me up, returning afterwards to his roorkee chair and the meandering, exploratory conversation that constituted his greatest pleasure and was continued from one summer to the next, first at Charleston and then at Lytton’s house, Ham Spray.
With Clive on the terrace at Charleston, 1925
Of Lytton I remember little – he was for me hardly more than a pair of dark brown eyes magnified by glasses, kindly, bat so intensely reflective that communication was almost out of the question. Janie Bussy, his niece, only a year or two older than Julian, was welcomed by all; Clive, the passport to whose favour was good looks, paid her the compliment of calling her a jolielaide, enjoying her wit and malice so much that he forgave her appearance. And indeed she had very beautiful eyes, almond-shaped and almost black, which opened to reveal an intense, secret vitality, as much Bussy as Strachey. Intelligent and tactful, she was nevertheless continuously alert, a merciless observer. Unlike most of our friends, she was elegant, resembling one of those parakeets her father Simon loved to paint, and it was as a painter herself and as a cousin of Duncan’s that she was welcomed into the Charleston studio. With Vanessa, who was very fond of her, she showed a tenderer side to her nature, a side that she usually hid under the brilliant badinage which, while it suited Charleston, may have hidden her true personality from other people. Ready to join in any of our activities, she was the perfect cousine retrouvée, lost to us for the six months she spent in France every year, returning each spring with the swallows. ‘The Bussys are here’ meant that not only they but the summer had arrived.
Another visitor was Roger Fry’s mistress, Helen Anrep, who after his death continued her intimate friendship with Vanessa. Duncan had first known her in Florence when he was twenty and she was living a gypsy life with her mother, singing to the guitar. Struck by her moon-daisy face and oriental passivity, he said she was his ideal of feminine beauty. Of all our friends she was closest to what in those days was called bohemian, meaning unconventional and penniless. She wore long, flowered dresses pinned at her bosom with a brooch, a shawl dripping from one shoulder, white stockings and little black shoes – rather as though she had stepped out of a picture by Goya or Manet. By nature she belonged to studio life and was no sooner in her chair than the artists once again decided to paint her. She sat contentedly, languidly gossiping in an ironic insinuating manner that I feared and disliked. I did not see the real affection that lay behind it, and it was not until much later when I read some of her letters written to Julian in China that I understood how genuine her sympathy could be. I remember too the impression of real dignity she made on me when, with Duncan, I visited her on her deathbed, no longer laughing at the misfortunes of her friends, simply a frail old woman.
There was however one
man about whom I had no reservations, and that was Roger Fry. Equally welcome to both painters and writers, his arrival at Charleston was always an occasion for joy and sometimes amusement, as when, startled by the view of Bunny’s aeroplane landing in an adjacent field just as he was driving up the lane, he immediately backed into the gatepost. For the Bloomsbury generation cars were an innovation, and while they welcomed them in theory, they never became accustomed to them in practice, and the machinery appeared to take control of them rather than the other way round. Intent on mastering it, however, Roger treated his car like some continuous scientific experiment, improvising various cures for its unpredictable behaviour with string, elastic bands or anything else that came to hand. Always uncaring of the impression he made, he was a myth and a source of myths, leaving behind him a trail of disbelief and amusement which his friends would magnify into a shape larger than life. If at times his demands were exorbitant, he replenished our spirits with some mysterious elixir and stirred our summer boredom to a new interest.
To me he was a grandfather with paternal and avuncular overtones, whom I had no qualms in asking to perform miracles. Thus he would teach me to tie knots designed never to come undone, make for me paper birds that flew, stick things together for me without the faintest sign of impatience, his deep voice purring gently, a forgotten smile hovering over his features. His attitude to making things was very different from that of Vanessa and Duncan. Duncan was like a child: his nails and glue were made of faith, and if this failed he simply laughed. Vanessa was more practical – indeed the curtain rods she hung from twisted nails and bits of string are still in place at Charleston – but Roger had theories and had to prove them, so that everything he made for me had the double fascination of being a game for me and an experiment intended for his own satisfaction.
In a suit of pepper-and-salt tweed, slightly bent at the knees, Roger was always in an attitude of absorbed curiosity, his rather large features almost unstrung from eager participation in whatever was going on. His fine white hair, parted in the middle, gave him a feminine appearance; his nose, larger than life, his teeth strong, the cleft in his chin deep – he recalled the wolf in Little Red Riding-Hood. His eyebrows were tufted, while beneath them his eyes lived in vital intensity behind gold-rimmed spectacles. His voice trembled, like a double bass, with a thousand shades of feeling and intelligence, together with the pleasure of being alive. Aware as he was of all the complexities and subtleties of art, he himself appeared to have no hidden corners, no reservations, and this, while it made him both vulnerable and attractive also, on occasion, made him difficult.
Roger and I, 1928
I did not know then that Roger and Vanessa had been lovers, although I could not be unaware of the special consideration with which he treated her, the intimacy mixed with deference, and his way of listening to what she said, almost as though he still hoped for a message that had gone astray. Although she basked in the glow of his extraordinary vitality, she was frequently exhausted by it, uninterested in his latest enthusiasm, on which she was liable to pour cold water. And when it came to criticism of her and Duncan’s painting, always one of the necessary ordeals of Roger’s visits, she was silent with inexpressible reservations. Her habit of keeping her most intimate feelings to herself meant that they took on an unavowable importance, and it was only after the much-loved but unsuspecting Roger had gone that Vanessa felt free to laugh with Duncan over all he had said. They resisted Roger’s influence – but it was very hard to deny its existence.
It was to Roger that I owe my first taste of asparagus; he brought bundles of it down to Charleston, having obtained it cheaply from some unusual source. I had made up my mind to dislike it simply because everybody was so concerned I should do otherwise, but when it appeared on the table, limp rods of jade and ivory, I allowed him to persuade me to try it – and then, naturally, could not have enough. He nearly always brought something with him – on one occasion a paper kite in the shape of an eagle, on another a matchbox decorated by himself with a small piece of jewellery inside. I remember his sensuous feeling for objects, and the passionate quality of his interest in the subject of the moment, blind to all else.
When I was very small, I was invited to tea by Roger at Dalmeny Avenue, in London. Several other little girls were there as well as his bearded, deep-voiced sister, Margery, who kept house for him. Expecting the spread of jellies, cakes and biscuits that were usually put before children, we each sat down to a plate bare of all but a baked potato. Discovering that these were made of cardboard, everyone but myself burst into tears. Somehow aware that this was what the grown-ups called a joke, I opened mine and found it filled with hundreds and thousands, multi-coloured sweets the size of a pin’s head, impossible to eat without scattering them all over the floor – indeed impossible to eat at all. Dismayed that their attempt to amuse us had fallen so flat, poor Margery bustled away to get the real tea, hidden behind a curtain, and the rest of the evening, no doubt spent more normally, was forgotten by me.
It was on a summer’s afternoon in 1934 that Clive, coming out to find me on the gravel in front of the house, told me that Roger had died. He told me no details, only hugged me so tight that I could scarcely breathe and certainly could not ask questions: my one desire was to get away from his suffocating grip, which seemed actually responsible for this dreadful news, and held no comfort. It was the first death I had experienced, and the unreality of it left me disorientated. The last time I had seen Roger he was alive and perfectly well – now he had disappeared; I was told that he had died, and I should never see him again. I knew that absences were painful, but it was impossible to believe in one that would last for ever …
Vanessa was at Monk’s House, with Leonard and Virginia, and when the news came she fainted. I don’t remember her return to Charleston, but the following day, on going near her bedroom, I heard her howling in anguish. The door was closed, and it was beyond me to open it – indeed I dared not, almost fearing that the creature who made those noises could not be my mother. I fled from the house, and walked far over the fields before I could persuade myself to return.
One day, while looking for a pen or pencil on Vanessa’s desk, I came across a letter from Helen, describing how Roger had slipped on the polished floor, to lie there for a long time until he was found, and how in hospital he had died of pneumonia, unconscious of what was happening – and I felt the healing comfort of reality, the certainty that no one was trying to shield me from the truth – I was free to make of it what I could. Helen had written part of her letter upside down, which somehow symbolised her state of mind as nothing else could have done. Trained not to read other people’s correspondence, however, I felt a certain shame at mentioning my discovery, and a possible source of understanding between myself and Vanessa sank without trace.
8
The Woolves
Our intimacy with the Woolves, as we called them, was close in spite of the fact that the atmosphere we breathed was very different. We were a family, whereas they were a couple, ranging through life with single-minded commitment. To them we, the younger generation, must have seemed disorganised and undisciplined, even egotistical, battening on to Vanessa and stretching her to the utmost. At the same time Virginia loved finding herself back in a family environment, and, feeling that an afternoon at Charleston was a holiday, her main purpose was to twang the strings and make them buzz with teasing and laughter. To her this was the breath of life, and she thoroughly enjoyed it. For us it was as though a stopper had been taken out of a bottle – criticisms, questions, and jokes poured out of her: we were exposed not only to her realms of imagination but to a mind as tough and sharp as obsidian.
Neither Virginia nor Leonard pretended to be other than they were; there was no facile morality or talking down to children – on the contrary Virginia was less remote than Vanessa and insisted on a reciprocity that filled the air with tension, which if sometimes alarming, was also stimulating. She was convinced that I inh
abited a world of fantasy special to myself, and she longed to enter it. In this world she was Witcherina and I, Pixerina; we flew over the elms and over the downs, our main object, as far as I remember, being to bring back fictitious information about other members of the family. As may be imagined, this suited Virginia to perfection, for she loved inventing improbable situations in which Julian, Quentin or Vanessa might find themselves, whereas I, dazzled by her virtuosity, remained wingless, fixed to the ground.
It was at teatime that I remember Virginia’s arrival at Charleston, pacing through the house, followed by Leonard and Pinka, the spaniel, whose feathered pads would slap on the bare boards beside her master’s more measured footfall. Virginia, seeing myself and Vanessa sitting by the fire or under the apple tree in the garden, would crouch beside us, somehow finding a small chair or low stool to sit on. Then she would demand her rights, a kiss in the nape of the neck or on the eyelid, or a whole flutter of kisses from the inner wrist to the elbow, christened the Ladies’ Mile after the stretch of sand in Rotten Row, Hyde Park, where Vanessa in the past had ridden on a horse given her by George Duckworth.
Virginia’s manner was ingratiating, even abject, like some small animal trying to take what it knows is forbidden. My objection to being kissed was that it tickled, but I was only there to be played off against Vanessa’s mute, almost embarrassed dislike of the whole demonstration. After a long hesitation, during which she wished that some miracle would cause Virginia to desist, she gave her one kiss solely in order to buy her off. Although she felt victimised and outwitted by her sister, she won the day by her power of resistance, and an utter inability to satisfy Virginia’s desires, which completely disregarded Vanessa’s feelings. She suffered mainly because, much as she loved Virginia and deep though her emotions were, she became almost unbearably self-conscious when called upon to show them. Of her love for Virginia there was no question: she simply wished that it could have been taken for granted. They were both affectionate, but Virginia had the advantage of articulateness, which Vanessa may have distrusted, having suffered from it in the past: Virginia’s flashes of insight into other people’s motivations could be disturbing. In one word she could say too much, whereas Vanessa, priding herself on her honesty, was inclined to say too little. Neither could Vanessa compete with Virginia’s brilliance and facility; made to feel emotionally inadequate, she also imagined herself lacking in intelligence. She distrusted Virginia’s flattery, in which she detected an element of hypocrisy, setting her on a pedestal for false reasons, but she did not see how to retaliate without brutality, of which she was incapable. She became more and more truculent, her exasperation masked by an ironic smile with which she tried to discourage Virginia’s efforts to extract a sign of love.
Deceived With Kindness Page 11