Finally we decided to hire a car and tour south to Naples, Pompeii and Paestum. We included the cascades of the Villa d’Este as well as those of Caserta, and stopped at every village market in the hope, often realised, of buying pottery or seductive if tattered pieces of silk and brocade. The weather became oppressively hot, and every evening, after a day spent in the back of a closed car, I suffered from an excruciating headache. Fearing Vanessa’s solicitude, I tried to hide my pain, and by the time we had seen the sights and eaten the inevitable stodgy spaghetti, my one desire was to collapse on my bed. We seldom if ever stayed in a good hotel, indeed probably there were none. Our lavatory was usually a stinking hole in the ground, and hot water was difficult to procure. One night I woke to see Vanessa in the bed beside me, searching for bugs by the light of the candle. Their squashed bodies decorated the walls, but I was fortunate in providing no temptation either to bed-bugs or fleas. I fell asleep again with a vision of Vanessa looking surprisingly young, her nightdress slipping off her shoulders, and a twist of silver hair falling down her back.
On our return to Rome Vanessa found a letter from Julian waiting for her; he had accepted a teaching job at the University of Wuhan, near Hankow, and was leaving for China in a month. Though not completely unexpected, this news was a shock to Vanessa who had probably not dreamt that China – four to five weeks away by boat, to her a country unknown and almost unreal – would be Julian’s objective. She at once packed our things and set off for England, amazed and perhaps disappointed to find that I was in a state of excitement, not at the thought of saying goodye to Julian, but at going down to Langford for the last two days of term. The temptation of flaunting my newly found independence was too great to be resisted.
In London I found Julian in a state of euphoria, shopping for topees and tropical suits, deciding on which gun and which books to take, as though he were going to be away for a lifetime. There were also friends and girlfriends to be bade farewell, whose claims he balanced one against another, like a juggler. He filled London, which in those days seemed far smaller than now, with his high spirits, responding with enthusiasm to the idea of going to the most foreign of all foreign places, hoping that the change would grant him a new lease of life. His greatest regret was at leaving Vanessa, whose fears and apprehensions he well understood, while she on her side tried to sympathise with his feeling that it would do him good to get away; the immense distance he was to travel symbolised the importance he attached to breaking away from so much that he loved and valued. It seemed as though the liberty which Vanessa had always appeared to offer was allowed only on the understanding that he would never take advantage of it, feeling that if he did she could not bear it. And yet, though this was in part the impression she gave, she also encouraged him to go; the intellectual part of her personality was in favour of individual liberty, while the emotional clutched desperately at her favourite son.
For Julian it was a supreme effort to gain his freedom, without if possible hurting his mother. He could not doubt, however, that he did cause her pain, but although this gave him a certain anguish, it could not quench his curiosity and enthusiasm. His love for Vanessa remained paramount: no other woman would come near her. She and he were more like lovers than mother and son: one had only to see him leaning over the back of her chair, and the quality of the smile on her face, to be aware of this. From China he wrote her a series of descriptive, informative and intimate letters, and she always looked forward to their arrival with longing. In one of these he says: ‘I’m far more devoted to you than I’ve ever been to a mistress, and indeed so much so that I should find it very difficult to marry because none of my friends and mistresses can begin to compare with you.’ Vanessa would read them aloud to us with a pleasure that betrayed her hunger: she missed a companionship that had steadily been growing closer. She viewed his departure rather in the light of a personal tragedy, which left her, if only temporarily, bereft and desolate.
Of all our personalities Julian’s was the warmest, the least reticent and the most courageous. Generous in spirit, he made friends easily in spite of a certain shyness; he could often be socially clumsy, but his contemporaries were attracted by his physical vitality and irresistible sincerity. Young for his years, his mind was filled with an amalgam of ideals and prejudices which lay down unhappily together, and he longed for greater experience to stabilise and orientate him. His adoration of Vanessa, which may have given him a greater understanding of women, did not make life easier for him, because the freedom he constantly struggled for was always in jeopardy. Imbued with the ideas and attitudes of his parents, for many of which he felt a deep sympathy, he was reluctant to relinquish a way of life that in many ways suited him, but he felt compelled to test it against his own discoveries. He thrashed about, like a fish too big for its pond, trying to find deeper water.
Julian, aged 22
For me his departure to China was rather like desertion at a moment when I particularly needed his understanding. It was in him alone that I found the imagination without which at that age one languishes; although he was still young, I trusted him, and I believed in him. He understood more than anyone else the effect of Vanessa’s dominance on the one hand, and of Duncan’s passivity on the other. He was indeed more aware of my predicament than I imagined, and wrote from China to tackle Vanessa about her possessiveness, thinking that she stood in the way of my sexual maturity. It was a considerable effort of courage and imagination; the effect it had on my life was negligible.
From Vanessa’s reply, ten pages long, it is evident that the arrow hit its mark. Discursive and subtle, much of what she says is plain common sense and some of it, quoted by Frances Spalding in her biography of Vanessa, is moving; but she reiterates her denial of possessiveness with a desperate desire to impose her rationality, like someone continuing to talk in an effort to drown the voice of doubt inside them. As I read it again, I feel the almost unbearable weight of her personality and the extraordinary sense of suffocation that resulted from so much fuss, when all one wanted was to be left alone.
It is true, however, that before he went abroad Julian’s own attitude to my sexual education was curiously confused. He veered from warmth and intimacy to behaviour that was painfully dismissive, as when he sent me from the room in order to discuss sexual subjects with a contemporary of mine whom he judged more sophisticated, or when he said – perhaps teasing me – ‘“Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever.”’ Although this roused me to fury, it didn’t prevent me from responding to him when we walked round the lawn by moonlight, talking about my vague and amorphous aspirations. It was his capacity for focussing his attention that was so extraordinary; no one else listened with such fullness of concentration, thus showing his own delicacy of perception and convincing me for a moment of my own validity. His occasional lack of sensibility was merely due to clumsiness; I learnt much from the warmth of his embraces, which resembled those of a lover and were exactly what I needed. I had seen little if any physical contact between my parents, no sharing of a bed or kisses snatched at odd moments, and I was deprived of sensuality; as a consequence I was, in spite of a hidden preoccupation with sex, deeply repressed. Both Duncan and Vanessa and Leonard and Virginia were, as couples, asexual if not virginal, and unable to initiate me, and there was something about Clive’s well-meant overtures that repelled me. Julian’s tenderness was therefore all the more important and all the harder to lose, especially at a time when I was on the threshold of my own sexual adventures.
I was lively, flirtatious and I think affectionate, with, like Virginia and Vanessa, an intense longing to be loved. I was not entirely stupid, but I was uninquisitive, timid and blinded by the egotism which, I think I may truthfully say, I had always been encouraged to manifest: I was insensitive to the needs and feelings of other people. My unbalanced flights towards independence were mere emotional flashes in the pan, unsupported by thought or reflection. Some strength of purpose I must have had, but even now I am una
ble to say what it was. I was very conformist, I might even say imitative, an attitude at first unconsciously encouraged by Louie, and then, finding myself unavoidably dominated by my mother, I was by the same token unable to imagine anything more original than actually becoming a second Vanessa. It is indeed only fairly recently that I have been ready to admit or recognise the profound differences between us, and how in reality I am more Grant, and perhaps McNeil, than Stephen.
However that may be, I was in those days moody, easily deflected, easily provoked either to tears or to laughter, without even a skeleton sense of values. Or rather, perhaps I should say that I never succeeded in sticking to my values except by default, or a refusal to engage myself more positively: my ideals were too youthfully intransigent to be adaptable to real life. None the less my instincts leant towards honesty and truthfulness, making me realise dazedly that my first obligation in these matters was towards myself. But emotionally, though sensitive, I was undeveloped. Weighed against those of other people, my feelings, even to myself, seemed to count for nothing. I had to nurse them in private to convince myself of their validity, and was unaware that this was the worst mistake I could have made. I lacked the ability to remain true to myself through thick and thin, in spite of the fact that I often appeared to other people as obstinate and intolerant – but this was a mere smokescreen, like the ink of the cuttle-fish. I was in reality a ready victim, and once I had been knocked down was unable to regain my balance. I was easily demoralised, and my need for affection led me to practise self-deception and subterfuge in order to get it. Any strength and resilience that might have accrued from a warmer relation to Duncan was simply not there, and as a result my sexuality, nourished on romanticism, was of an unbelievable fragility, hardly calculated to attract young men of my own age – though I did have some admirers. It was more that I was only partially attracted to them: unfortunately I never fell in love with one of them.
Though I was indifferent to such things, I could not remain unaware of Julian’s political activities; neither was I completely insensitive to the menace of the international situation. I said nothing, but was frightened, and hardly reassured by the noisy and animated discussions which took place between Julian and his friends on the lawn at Charleston. I was not expected to join in, and had I done so it would, I felt, have been rather like jumping into an electric mixer. Ten years older than myself, brimming with ideas, articulate and well informed, Julian’s friends terrified me partly by their intellectual brilliance, which seemed to leave no room for gentler feelings, and partly by their view of the world at large, which appeared to dismiss the human element as of no account. I did not realise that this was prompted by the condition of the world itself, and that they were sincerely concerned about the future: I simply failed to recognise it through the glitter of words and phrases.
I was horrified by the glimpses I got of a world where individuals counted for nothing and were simply the pawns of powers who themselves were struggling to supersede each other. Incapable of objective questioning or assessment, stricken because I instinctively realised that listening to these young men involved saying goodbye to childhood, I retreated from the scene they conjured up. In the light of their conversation, even those things which appeared most solid and unshakeable were threatened. In the growing sense of anguish even the sound of an aeroplane was ominous. Never again would we know those calm country silences, when all noises were either animal or human, when the sound of a tree falling two miles away defined the distance between it and ourselves, or the twittering of a lark in the sky measured the spaces of blue air above; even the mechanical hum of the threshing machine called forth a sympathetic echo from the empty, sunbaked fields. Now these sounds were rapidly becoming drowned by the noise of car, lorry and aeroplane, never, in the foreseeable future, to be silenced. Lying in the grass listening to phrases about bayonets and fifth columnists, Hitler and Fascists, I froze, like a mouse, in my place, hoping that these terrifying images would pass me by.
The next year was in many ways an exciting one. For the first time in my life I found myself living away from home, in a foreign and highly sympathetic environment. Julian gone, I went to Paris to live with some friends of the Bussys with whom, as one is apt to do in those years of one’s life, I fell deeply in love – a love affair of friendship that has lasted to this day.
François Walter, handsome and bearded, was a civil servant and at the same time a left-wing agitator for peace, editing a paper called Vigilance. At the threat of a coup d’état by the Action Française, François learnt to shoot with a pistol, lending our lives a quality which in England would have been termed overdramatic but in France seemed merely realistic. Zoum, his wife, came from a family of Belgian artists, and she herself looked like a figure from a picture by Georges de La Tour, dignified, ample and superb. She too was a painter; her easels and canvases were to me a familiar adjunct of life, although her paintings were quite unlike any I had seen before. Deeply in love, she would become desperately anxious if François were late for supper, and hang out of the window on the sixth floor, hoping to hear the sound of his taxi. When he eventually returned, he was bitterly reproached and then passionately embraced before being given a delicious meal. Immediately afterwards François would plunge into editing his paper, pacing up and down the apartment until far into the night, sustained on minute cups of black coffee.
To me such scenes were a revelation of the possibilities in human relationships hitherto suspected only through literature. Zoum’s mother Jeanne, there on a long visit, attracted me less in spite of her motherliness, as, imbued with the spirit of gallic common sense, she tried to brush away the cobwebs of my nordic shyness. Shocked at my ignorance of the mechanics of sex, which she discovered one morning after a thorough questioning in the kitchen, she did her best to enlighten me; but I closed my ears to the information she offered. Neither did she improve our relations by sitting on the other side of the double doors when I was practising my violin, shouting at intervals, ‘Angelica, c’est faux!’ These trying shrieks affected me like a violation: I felt that my faults should be left to me and my violin mistress.
It was Zoum who was my second mother; her robustness, kindness and sense of humour never failed me, even in years to come. I was amazed by her combination of masculine intellect, emotional warmth and sensuality, which I had never met before. She too was a dominating personality and I fell completely under her spell. Her husband, François, was on the contrary all nervous intellect, refined, objective, trained to dismiss all save the one fact that mattered. Deeply attracted, I was at the same time nervous of drawing his attention to myself, happier when he paid me none, and yet thrilled if he ever did so. Certainly these four months in Paris were a time of being fully alive, and of learning much that was new; a time of intensified interest that has remained a yardstick ever since.
On my return to London in the spring of 1936 I went almost immediately to the London Theatre Studio as a pupil of Michel Saint-Denis, whom I had last seen as Noé in the Compagnie des Quinze. I eventually got to know him well, as our friendship continued both during the war and after, when my children, then small, caught his delighted attention. As a student I was lost in love and admiration for him, seeing in him a Zeus-like father figure for whose good opinion I craved. As far as age went he was barely old enough for such a role, but in knowledge of human nature he was singularly cut out for it.
At first his appearance was unimpressive; without being fat he was short and fairly solid, almost stocky, usually dressed in unremarkable grey tweed. It was when he was seated that one became aware of the nobility of his forehead, completed by the curve of his aquiline nose, on either side of which was a pair of shrewd, hawklike eyes. His mouth, from which usually hung a curved pipe, was full and sensual; he spoke with a strong gallic accent, and a cogency that carried complete conviction.
With us, his students, his relationship was largely avuncular, although it could on occasion betray a sadistic element. In
spite of his difficulty with the language, he had all the articulateness of an actor, having at his command every means both of persuasion and compulsion. We were as wax in his hands. He could on occasion be chillingly and even cruelly ironic, a mood against which we had little protection especially if, like myself, we were willing victims. Nevertheless, he was a remarkable teacher, and, as I now think, a great man, deeply cultivated and with interests outside the theatre which enriched his productions within it. Since his death he has been either ignored or condemned as a crank, but his was a rich personality, impregnated with emotion and sensibility in addition to a powerful intelligence; and to him the theatre in England as well as France owes a debt of gratitude.
As at Langford, my progress at the school was qualified by Michel’s respect for Bloomsbury. My career there began well: I was a tree in a mime-play about Orpheus; but it continued on a downward path, although not without moments of success. When, for example, I played the part of one of the heroines in a comedy by Dryden, Michel told me that for five minutes I had succeeded in acting – ‘You can act!’ This was a red-letter day, its greatest merit being that, not having put it to the test, I can still dream that it might have been true. Michel was always particularly kind and charming to me, but his treatment of me as someone ‘special’ added to my sense of unreality: I felt like a paper doll trying to enter an alien world. When he finally rejected my interpretation of Irina in The Three Sisters, I was both hurt and confused. For reasons of his own he had given me very little help during rehearsals (on which, unusually, he had chosen to bestow his personal direction), and I now felt as though, without explanation, he were reversing his previous attitude towards me. I hid my feelings behind a show of indifference, which even he was powerless to penetrate.
Deceived With Kindness Page 13