by Peter Dally
Inevitably the children suffered, especially Virginia and Adrian; ‘the DNB crushed [Adrian’s] life out before he was born’, wrote Virginia. ‘It gave me a twist of the head too. I shouldn’t have been so clever but I should have been more stable without [it].’12 Her anxiety was heightened by the noisy scenes, her mother’s increasingly obvious exhaustion and her father’s distress. She sat reading DNB articles, confused as to where her loyalties lay.
* * *
In 1892 Mrs Jackson died. Julia’s grief went deep, for the relationship between mother and daughter had been intense and complex. Her death brought out Julia’s guilt; she could have done more for her mother, she had not been a good daughter. As ever, she was unable to share her misery with anyone, and certainly not her daughters. Leslie was sympathetic, within his limitations, although in his heart he was probably glad to see the last of his rival for Julia’s affection.
Julia, in her unhappiness, immersed herself in good works and before long:
she had expanded so far, into such remote recesses, alleys in St Ives, London slums, and many other more prosperous but no less exacting quarters that retrenchment was beyond her power.
She drained herself. Leslie, at night, would look up from his book, press her hand and protest, ‘There must be an end of this, Julia,’ but he was powerless to halt the decline.13
In March 1895 Julia was taken ill with influenza. Recovery was slow and at the end of April signs of heart disease developed. On 5 May, in Leslie’s words, she sank ‘quietly into the arms of death’.14
Chapter Four
Virginia’s Early Life and Temperament
Virginia was a robust infant despite Julia having stopped breastfeeding at ten weeks (with Leslie’s somewhat reluctant agreement), too tired to continue. During her nursery years she was a lively, imaginative child; playful, affectionate and disputative, in no way unusual. By the time she was five she was highly strung, an inventive story-teller and already a bookworm.
The turning point in Virginia’s character formation came, according to Quentin Bell, when all the children went down with whooping cough – a dangerous disease then – and were sent to Bath to convalesce. When she returned she was thinner, more introspective, and prone to anxiety at night. It is an age when children are struggling to establish an identity and to assimilate those aspects of a parent they most admire. Virginia surprised her sister at this time by asking her which parent she preferred. Vanessa unhesitatingly chose her mother and was astonished by Virginia’s choice of their remote father.
Yet Virginia adored her mother and always strove to have more of her. She admired her beauty, craved her company, sought her praise, anxiously wanted to know her whereabouts. Virginia’s delight was to be soothed by her voice and touch, to listen for the rustle of her dress as she came upstairs into the night-nursery, to smell her fragrance as she bent to give a goodnight kiss. When her mother was absent Virginia’s world shrank.
Julia could be warm-hearted, but the demands made on her by eight children, one of them autistic, a husband whose sanity sometimes seemed in doubt, a demanding mother, and a trail of invalids left her little emotion to spare for Virginia. She was a disciplined, if driven, woman and she had, of necessity, to economise on her time and energy. Not only did she have a large house to run and six or seven servants to organise, but when the children were young she and Leslie taught them the three ‘R’s and the rudiments of History, English and French.
Neither she nor Leslie were good teachers. Both were impatient with slowness or any hint of stupidity. Leslie was liable to lose his temper and thump the table when not understood. Julia never lost self-control but she was more punitive and harsher in her reactions than Leslie. Leslie was basically kinder and, once an outburst was over, he would regret the scene and attempt to mend fences. Julia never backtracked. She said hurtful things which she meant.
Virginia was only five when Julia banished Laura from Hyde Park Gate to a ‘Home’, although the girl continued to join the family at St Ives in the summer for two more years. Virginia loathed her and looked on her as a ‘vacant-eyed girl’, an idiot who stammered and grimaced and was a figure of fun, who sometimes howled and broke things or threw them into the fire.1 What really disturbed her, however, was her mother’s cold harshness to Laura, her shocking rejection of the girl when it became obvious that Laura would never conform.
The effect of these scenes on Virginia made a lasting impression. Throughout her life she shrank from any passing idiot or imbecile. When an ‘idiot boy sprang up with his hand outstretched, mewing, slit-eyed, red-rimmed’ during a walk in Kensington Gardens, she was too upset to mention the incident even to Vanessa.2 And years later when, walking with Leonard, they encountered a long line of ‘miserable, ineffective, shuffling, idiotic creatures, with no forehead or no chin, and an imbecilic grin’, she declared ‘they should certainly be killed’.3 The intensity of her reaction is indicative of the horror and anxiety Laura aroused in Virginia, a horror that came both from her own dislike of Laura and the sight of her mother’s rejection of the girl, which set Virginia’s vivid imagination to work, making herself the disobedient child.
Julia was ‘the very centre of that great cathedral space which was childhood’, and Virginia’s emotional security rested on her mother.4 But as she grew up she increasingly found herself at odds with her mother’s views on womanhood and the contrasting roles of men and women. Julia fervently believed a woman’s duty lay with husband and family, and she gave short shrift to any feminist views; along with Octavia Hill and Beatrice Webb she signed Mrs Humphrey Ward’s Manifesto Against Female Suffrage in 1889. Her rules were uncomplicated. Women ran the home and men had charge of all important matters outside the home. Julia maintained they were mentally superior to women, although at home they depended on their womenfolk and had to be looked after. Virginia could not accept such a doctrine of male superiority. She bitterly resented her brothers going to school while she and Vanessa were educated at home, taught to dance and sing and prepare themselves for the marriage market. She wanted to be independent, to become a writer like her father.
Leslie believed ‘Ginny’ would ‘become an author in time’.5 He gave her the run of his library, recommended books to read and made her feel ‘special’. She absorbed his ways and literary habits but, although she admired him enormously, she was never emotionally close to him. She emulated him but could not love him, in the way she did her mother. Julia did nothing to dampen Virginia’s literary enthusiasm – she herself wrote rather depressing children’s stories recounting the misfortunes that befell rebellious children, and a book on nursing – but one suspects she looked on Virginia’s scribblings and ‘blue stocking’ ways as a passing phase to her future life as wife and mother.
Virginia’s need for her mother and, later on, mother substitutes to openly demonstrate their love came very early on. She was extraordinarily greedy for affection. Even in her fifties she would still ‘demand her rights’ from Vanessa, ‘a kiss on the nape of the neck, or on the eyelid, or a whole flutter of kisses from the inner wrist to the elbow.’6 It embarrassed everyone but until Virginia received a ‘sign of love’ she would persist.
Virginia’s anxiety, observed by both parents, increased steadily through childhood. Some of it was probably constitutional and inherited from her father, although the effect of cyclothymic genes is not usually seen until after puberty; cyclothymes, as a group, are not characteristically anxious children. There was plenty of anxiety in the Stephen household in the 1880s, mostly generated by Leslie, which would have affected Virginia, but the core of her anxiety lay in the conflict of loyalties to mother and father, and resulting confusion. She could not survive without her mother’s love. She could not accept a life outside her father’s world.
She felt safe with her father in his library. She was his favourite child. He made her feel they were in league together. She in turn, a cherubic child when small, charmed him. ‘I never saw such a little rogue’, Leslie
chuckled as the two-year-old squeezed up to him and demanded a kiss, or sat on his lap and picked crumbs from his beard.7 She never feared him, even when witness to one of his fearful rages. She might feel anger and contempt but her bond with him was untouched.
Virginia’s love for her mother was more complicated and on a deeper level, and rarely returned to Virginia’s satisfaction. No sooner did she have Julia’s attention than her mother was away. There was always a sense of absence and, although Virginia knew she was loved, anxious doubts kept arising. Had she offended? Was she the least-loved child? Separation anxiety grew. When Julia was away from home Virginia was restless and apprehensive.
This was most apparent in London, where Julia travelled everywhere on horse-drawn buses, and street accidents were common; Virginia always recorded the accidents she saw in the streets in her diary. When Julia was late home Virginia would hover near the front door, peering out of the window, unable to settle until the familiar figure came in sight.
During the three summer months that the family spent at St Ives Virginia was far less anxious. She saw more of her mother. Julia visited the local sick but they were few compared to London, and within walking distance, and Julia’s mother was too distant for her daughter to respond to every call. Instead, Mrs Jackson sometimes came to stay with the Stephens at Talland House, along with old family friends. Julia was able to relax and tensions noticeably dropped. Virginia looked on those summer holidays as the happiest time of her childhood, and Cornwall and St Ives always retained a magical quality for her; Talland House on the hill above the town, and the sea, ‘more congenial to me than any human being’.8 Virginia felt united with her mother in a way that was impossible in London. The sense of unity, no more than momentary, gave way to rapture, the memory of which was indelible.
That sense of unity returned when her mother died and, with George and Vanessa, she went to meet Thoby at Paddington Station, summoned back from school. The glass dome of the station was ablaze with light from the setting sun and as she walked along the platform she became lost in rapture, her fears dissipated, at peace and united within herself; ‘It was surprising – as if something were becoming visible without effort.’9
In striking contrast was the unreality which could possess Virginia at moments of high anxiety, when her surroundings changed in quality and feeling and became unfamiliar, and time and space were distorted. At its height a threatening sense of isolation set off panic which almost paralysed her.
Virginia’s first experience of this was at St Ives when she overheard her parents discussing the suicide of a neighbour. Later that evening, walking in the moonlit garden, she came across an old apple tree that seemed to contain the horror of the suicide, the man’s despair. She stood staring at the tree, the furrows on its bark forming strange patterns in the moonlight, unable to move, panic rising.
Again, in Kensington Gardens, she went to cross a rain puddle on the pathway when ‘for no reason I could discover everything suddenly became unreal. I was suspended. I could not step across the puddle. I tried to touch something … the world became unreal.’10
These experiences led her to believe that ‘something terrible’ lay in wait for her, some malign fate. She became conscious of her own ‘powerlessness’ to ward it off and she felt ‘dumb horror’ and depression.11 Forty years later Virginia reproduced the incident of the puddle in The Waves:
There is the puddle,’ said Rhoda, ‘and I cannot cross it. I hear the rush of the great grindstone within an inch of my head … All palpable forms of life have failed me. Unless I can stretch and touch something hard, I shall be blown down the eternal corridors for ever.’12
Virginia sought a philosophy which might provide a sense of unity. The seed had been planted at St Ives when she was nine or ten. Looking at a flower she had a revelation; the ring of earth surrounding the plant was part of it, and with the flower made up a whole. Like many revelations the observation itself was banal, but the emotion was intense. It set in train a line of thought which in time evolved into the idea of there being a pattern behind everything, within every event. If she could discover that pattern, the event – good or bad – would become whole and comprehensible. The ‘sledgehammer blows’ of fate might be understood and even utilised.13
On the surface Virginia’s ideas appear commonplace, for most people try to make sense out of chaos, but she gradually introduced a mystical element into her thinking:
the whole world is a work of art … we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words.14
It was through words that Virginia tried to make order out of chaos. She discerned:
some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me, it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when, in writing, I seem to be discovering what belongs to what.15
That rapture always visited Virginia in the early stages of her novels: she galloped ahead without pause, free of anxiety, in control of events, powerful and self-contained.
* * *
Stella Duckworth came naturally to be a second mother to Virginia and Adrian. She had been devoted to Julia – a ‘beautiful attendant handmaid, feeding her mother’s vivid flame, rejoicing in the service and making it the central duty of her life’ – and looked on her mother as ‘a person of divine power and divine intelligence’.16 The umbilical cord was never cut and mother and daughter developed a telepathic understanding of each other. Stella had almost no independent life and apparently no desire for one. She could not bear to be parted from her mother and even a short separation distressed her. When she was rarely persuaded to go away for a holiday she was ‘white as a ghost’ for days before taking a tearful leave, which the watchful Virginia always noticed.17
She attracted men but invariably refused their proposals. Since Julia believed that ‘an unmarried woman has missed the best of life’,18 she would have pushed Stella into marriage before long, had she not died. While the family was at St Ives in the summer of 1894, Stella turned down for a second time her most persistent suitor, Jack Hills, and afterwards a fascinated Virginia listening intently through the bedroom wall, heard the sound of her crying.
The twelve-year-old Virginia’s ideas of marriage reflected her age: gathered mostly from books and passing remarks and regarded with a mixture of fear and excitement. The subject was never discussed in any real terms at home and Virginia, although puzzled by Stella’s resistance to marriage, may have intuitively understood why. Twelve years later, when Vanessa began to hint at marriage, Virginia was to echo Stella’s tearful cry, ‘What can it matter where we are so long as we are all together?’19
Men could sometimes seem alarming. Virginia’s huge, handsome, cyclothymic cousin Jim Stephen was attracted to Stella and liable, when hypomanic, to burst into Hyde Park Gate and demand kisses.20 It was both thrilling and frightening, made more so when Virginia and Vanessa were told to pretend that Stella had gone away.
When Virginia was five or six years old, her half-brother Gerald stood her upon a table and explored her ‘private parts’, an act she recalled years later with a ‘shiver of shame’.21 The effect on her psycho-sexual development was probably minor but her dislike of Gerald was enduring. Her attitude to George, her other half-brother, was much warmer although he is held to be a sexual monster by Virginia’s feminist admirers. In her childhood he was a father-figure and Virginia looked on him then with affection. When he died in 1934 she was distressed, and her last conversation about him with her doctor, shortly before she killed herself, showed she ‘evidently adored him’.22
After Julia died, George continued to
live at Hyde Park Gate ‘in complete chastity’ until he was 36 when, soon after Leslie’s death, he achieved his ambition of marrying into the aristocracy.23 Before then he undertook to bring out his half-sisters in society, and for several seasons Virginia endured the ordeal of dances and dinner parties that, although they provided interesting material for future writing, left her cold with embarrassment and boredom. According to Virginia, when she was half-asleep in bed, George would creep in and throw himself on top of her crying, ‘Don’t be frightened … and don’t turn on the light. Oh, beloved. Beloved!’24
George invariably behaved like an affectionate puppy with his half-sisters, embracing them in public and kissing them exuberantly. He may well have lain on Virginia’s bed and kissed her and uttered endearments – it was quite in keeping – but it is unlikely that he went further. She gave a witty account of these encounters to the Memoir Club which reduced everyone to tears of mirth. George was, she declaimed in hypomanic style, ‘not only father and mother, brother and sister to those poor Stephen girls, he was their lover also.’25
In July 1911 when hypomanic and prone to fantasise, she revealed ‘all George’s malefactions’ to her old Greek tutor and friend Janet Case, who was so shocked ‘she dropped her lace, and gasped like a benevolent gudgeon. By bedtime she said she was feeling quite sick, and did go to the W.C., which, needless to say, had no water in it.’26 Virginia pulled no punches when high! A year earlier in the summer, she had fabricated an absurdly funny but malicious story about Vanessa that had so outraged their humourless friend Saxon Sydney Turner that Vanessa had to protest angrily.
The account of George’s lovemaking probably contains a core of truth but there is no evidence that Virginia was distressed by it. On the contrary, she may have been amused and enjoyed the fondling. Petting with parental substitutes (and George was still one in 1902) always gave her satisfaction. It may also have reassured her that male sexuality was harmless.