by Peter Dally
Chapter Five
Deaths – The First Major Breakdown, 1904
Julia died on 5 May. Leslie was distraught; he had once again been abandoned. The 13-year-old Virginia was confused. She frightened her half-sister Stella by telling her, ‘When I see Mother, I see a man sitting with her.’1 Perhaps in Virginia’s imagination Julia had left the Stephens to rejoin Herbert Duckworth.
It was impossible to grieve and mourn at Hyde Park Gate. The sound of Leslie groaning and repeating his wish to die tolled like a knell through the darkened house, and a steady stream of visitors repeated platitudes and shed tears. Virginia could speak to no one of her loss and fears, her sense of abandonment, the desperate need for affection. The children clung together but none of them spoke of their mother or her death.
Stella, at first too shocked even to speak Julia’s name, hid her feelings in public. When Virginia surprised her alone and in tears, she sprang up, wiped her eyes and protested that nothing was wrong. Still, in the end, it was Stella who rescued Virginia from ‘this great interval of nothingness’.
Pulling herself together, Stella took charge of the family; there was no one else. She looked after her stepfather and attended to his comforts, listening patiently to his self-pitying stories. The more she gave, the more he demanded and, as time passed, Stella, trying her best to emulate Julia, grew thin and pale with exhaustion. Julia’s death had taught Leslie nothing. His tyrannical egotism and need for sympathy blinded him to Stella’s distress.
She was [he told a friend] my great support; she is very like her mother in some ways – very sweet and noble and affectionate. I am sometimes worried by thinking that she ought to be a wife and mother and that she may find reasons for leaving me.2
When she did marry, two years later, his world turned topsy-turvy.
Virginia was seriously ill for many months after Julia’s death but she did not become insane. She retreated to her room, her refuge and hiding-place, and became almost housebound. The outside world was threatening and she feared meeting people. Depression and anxiety almost paralysed her; she slept badly and lost weight. She could no longer write or even read for a time. But she did not go mad; she remained, trembling, in touch with her surroundings.
Stella came to her rescue. Her half-sister became the mother-figure she needed. She looked after Virginia with great understanding and affection, far more so than Julia had done, and gradually Virginia responded and began to feel more secure. Stella insisted on Virginia leading an ordered life, drinking supplementary milk, taking her medicines and following Dr Seton’s prescribed routine. She had to go out several times a day; usually to walk with Leslie in Kensington Gardens, meet Vanessa after her Art class, and to shop or make social calls with Stella. As she improved she began to devour books at such a rate that Leslie was concerned. But he liked his daughter’s bookish voracity, and he discussed books with her and advised her on what to read. Virginia thrived and her admiration for her father grew.
Fifteen months after Julia’s death Virginia’s anxiety returned when Stella became engaged to Jack Hills. There was ‘excitement and emotion and gloom’ in the family. Adrian cried. Leslie was upset but said, unselfishly for once, ‘We must all be happy because Stella is happy’ – a command which, poor man, he could not himself obey.3 Virginia was as distressed as her father, angry and appalled at the prospect of losing her second mother. That October she had panic attacks and Dr Seton reimposed restrictions on her reading and mental activity.
Stella’s marriage did not take place until April 1897, due to Leslie’s delaying tactics, but the wait was beneficial to Virginia. Stella went to great lengths to include her half-sister in the wedding preparations, and to reassure her she was not being abandoned. She repeatedly emphasised she was leaving home only to move into the house across the street, and she would continue to see and watch over Virginia as before.
Virginia’s jealousy of Jack, mild in comparison to Leslie’s, slowly diminished. She made an effort to get to know him and she came to picture his love for Stella in idealised terms. It was her ‘first vision then of love between man and woman’ and she envied their closeness.4 Jack was passionately and demonstratively in love and Stella responded by growing in confidence and looks. As Virginia saw their happiness her anxiety abated and by the beginning of 1897 she was well enough to start a diary.
However, as the marriage date neared, her fears re-emerged. She delayed until the very last moment, going to church to hear the banns read, although that may have been more a protest against attending church than the marriage itself, and she refused to kneel. She bought a wedding present, a lamp, just two days before the wedding and the strain was so great she almost fainted and had to be brought home by cab.5 She and Vanessa were bridesmaids; ‘Goodness knows how we got through it all – certainly it was half a dream, or a nightmare’, Virginia recorded.6
Stella returned home from the honeymoon at the end of April feeling ill, with ‘a bad chill on her innards’, eventually diagnosed as appendicitis complicated by peritonitis.7 Three months of intermittent illness followed, during which time Virginia’s state of mind mirrored Stella’s condition. At first she could not sleep alone and moved into Vanessa’s bedroom. She haunted Stella’s bedside. Her relief when Stella improved was enormous; ‘Now that Old Cow [Julia’s nickname for Stella] is most ridiculously well and cheerful … thank goodness’.8 But Stella’s improvement was short-lived, and Dr Seton stopped Virginia’s lessons in Greek and Latin and ordered extra milk and medicines. A week before Stella’s death Virginia collapsed with ‘rheumatism’ and ‘fidgets’, and was put to bed.
Stella died on 19 July, after a mistimed operation. Had Dr Seton been in attendance (he was incapacitated by sciatica) he might have opposed the surgeons and perhaps saved Stella’s life – and altered the course of Virginia’s. Her lifelong distrust of doctors had a firm foundation.
Stella’s death, coming so soon after her mother’s, was shattering. ‘But this is impossible,’ Virginia kept repeating to herself, ‘things aren’t, can’t be, like this.’9 Her diary tailed off and ended with the year, not to be resumed for 20 months. However, the ending was not entirely without hope: ‘Courage and plod on – They [the years] must bring something worth the having.’10 This time Virginia could grieve, for she was able to talk and share her feelings with Vanessa and Jack.
Before Stella died it was known she was pregnant; Virginia may have connected her death in some way with sex. There was gossip at the time that Jack ‘had in some way injured’ his wife through his rapacious sexual demands and roughness.11 According to her friend Violet Dickinson – who later became another maternal substitute for Virginia – Stella had found intercourse painful.
Problems built up between Virginia and Vanessa over the following two years, which were not unlike the complications that were to follow Vanessa’s marriage to Clive Bell ten years later. Jack Hills continued to haunt the Stephen family, visiting Hyde Park Gate every evening and spending weekends with them at holiday time. Vanessa and Virginia took turns to comfort him, listened to him sympathetically and held his hand. At Painswick, where the Stephens stayed after Stella’s death, one or other of the sisters walked in the garden with him after dinner, and that September they stayed with him at his parents’ home, Corby Castle.
Virginia, with her novelist’s instinct and curiosity, persuaded Jack to talk about his feelings for Stella, and his sexual desire and frustrations. ‘We were [mentally] “intimate” for years’, she wrote, but she was not physically attracted to him.12 She liked him but his main interest for her lay in what he revealed of himself and men’s sexual lives and, above all, because he had been Stella’s husband.
Vanessa, on the other hand, who had regarded Stella more as a friend and sister rather than a mother, was physically drawn to Jack and he in turn to her. Virginia increasingly felt left out of the relationship and became jealous, suddenly afraid of losing her last remaining prop.
It was all very theatrical
: three lonely unhappy people, seeking comfort from one another. The affair petered out but only after George had intervened to point out that it was illegal for in-laws to marry. To Virginia’s short-lived delight, he asked her to persuade Vanessa to see sense. There was a scene between the sisters, which ended in Virginia asking for forgiveness, and mutual embraces.
As the only women in a household of demanding men, Virginia and Vanessa drew together and closed ranks, forming, in Virginia’s words, ‘a close conspiracy’.13 Vanessa became responsible for the household affairs from 1897 to Leslie’s death in 1904. Virginia called this time ‘the seven unhappy years’, but they were valuable years for her. She read prodigiously, guided by her father. She studied Latin and Greek. She kept a journal and experimented with differing styles of writing, composed essays and wrote some perceptive sketches of people. She discovered a love of music and went to concerts, and began to make friends and to move tentatively outside the family circle.
Minor cyclothymic swings had begun around the age of 17 but she was, for most of this time, comparatively stable and well. Her weight was steady, menstruation regular and there were no panic attacks or outbursts of unreasonable temper.14 Life was mostly a dull, undemanding routine, without undue stress.
The unhappiness of these seven years came from conflicting feelings towards her father. He was, she thought, a split personality: the good, literary, humane man she adored and the bullying, brutal, egocentric tyrant she hated. Her ambivalence was not of course new, but it became magnified through his cavalier treatment of Vanessa.
Every Wednesday after lunch, Vanessa presented the household accounts for her father’s inspection. After a moment’s silence he invariably accused her of extravagance and became heated and abusive: ‘I am ruined. Have you no pity for me? There you stand like a block of stone…’15 He would roar and hammer on the table but Vanessa never responded. She stood mute, looking into the distance until at last, with a heavy sigh, Leslie signed the cheque and she immediately left the room.
Virginia was outraged by the brutality of these scenes, feeling ‘unbounded contempt’ for her father ‘and pity for Vanessa’.16 His melodramatic behaviour was reserved entirely for women. Virginia was certain her father would have restrained himself had a man been present. He looked on his womenfolk as part saint, part slave, there to satisfy his infantile needs. Julia and Stella had stuck to the rules of his game but Vanessa refused to play. When Stella died he assumed Vanessa would put on the mantle of the Angel in the House and he was astonished and upset to discover he was wrong, unable to adapt his ways. Angry though these scenes made her, Virginia did not follow Vanessa from the room. She sat on in silence hoping perhaps for some sign from her father that might redeem him in her eyes. After a time he would abandon his self-pity and look at Virginia and say, half contritely, ‘You must think me … foolish.’17
Leslie treated Virginia more like a man potentially his equal than one of his women. She was like him in many ways, and she was easily his favourite child, the one destined to become a writer, to follow the Stephen tradition.
Virginia had immense admiration for the good literary father, his honesty and unworldliness and sincerity, and she criticised her mother for not having checked his unpleasant egocentric side. But like her, she believed the DNB to have been responsible for much of his later deterioration. The loved and hated father continued to obsess her long after his death, and she argued and raged against him and told him what she had dared not say to him in life.
She craved Leslie’s love and respect, but that could only come, she believed, through literary success. She never argued with him in life or challenged his opinion, even to herself. An unenthusiastic comment from him about her work would have been a terrible rejection and she never showed him any of her writing. The idea for her first novel, The Voyage Out, came to her at Manorbier in South Wales, after Leslie’s death. Some years later, while writing the first draft, she had a dream where she showed him the manuscript and ‘he snorted, and dropped it on the table, and I was very melancholy’.18 Recalling him when she was famous, Virginia confessed that had he lived on to be 100, she could not have become a writer: ‘no writing, no books’.19 Any criticism from him would have destroyed her.
It was a truth that her husband Leonard came to understand intuitively. He always read the manuscript of each novel and Virginia waited on tenterhooks until he pronounced it to be ‘Your best’. Only then was Virginia’s mind put at rest. It mattered not that she thought, ‘Has he not got to think so?’ The approving words were crucial.
Virginia and Vanessa had few secrets from one another during those seven years. Each industriously pursued her own interest. Vanessa went to Cope’s School of Art three days a week until 1901, when she entered the Painting School of the Royal Academy. Virginia had lessons in Greek twice a week, and read widely and developed her descriptive powers. They supported each other, confided, ridiculed and laughed about the family and friends, especially their half-brother George who was forever wanting to turn them into elegant young ladies. Vanessa alone at that time gave Virginia the warmth and care she needed, and encouraged her fantasies and sense of the absurd. Their nicknames from nursery days lived on: Virginia, Billy (goat); the singes, the Apes; Vanessa, the Dolphin.
Virginia listened sympathetically when Vanessa railed against their father but there were times when she would have liked to talk of his good side, his understanding and sensibility, but Vanessa gave her no opportunity. Any suggestion that Leslie had good qualities would be met by sulky silence and a wall of rejection, which Virginia had to avoid at all cost.
* * *
Leslie became ill in 1902 with cancer of the bowel. He continued to work and summer holiday with his children until his death, but the old fiery spirit was gone. During this time the twenty-year-old Virginia desperately needed a sympathetic ear, to unburden herself of guilt and love, to speak of the agony of losing her father. Vanessa could not help. It was then that Virginia found what she most needed: a maternal ‘aunt’.
Violet Dickinson was 37, a tall, gawky spinster, well read, musical, cultivated, with a natural charm. She had been a close friend of Stella’s and Virginia had always liked her, although previously she had not known her well. Perhaps Violet Dickinson recognised Virginia’s plight and made a deliberate effort to be sympathetic. Whatever it was, Virginia responded and threw herself, literally and metaphorically, into Violet’s arms. Violet reciprocated. Virginia’s mind had always interested her and she was prepared to mother her and meet her emotional demands.
Virginia discussed every detail of her father’s terminal illness with Violet and brought out her anxieties and admiration: ‘He is such an attractive creature, and we get on so well when we’re alone.’20 She clung to Violet gratefully: ‘You are the only sympathetic person in the world. That’s why everyone comes to you with their troubles.’21 Within a short time Violet had come, together with Leslie, to occupy the centre of her thoughts. She wove childish fantasies of herself and Violet. Violet was a kangaroo whose pouch was a ‘haven for small kangaroos’. Virginia became ‘Sparroy’, derived from Sparrow and Monkey. It is noteworthy that, with Vanessa, Violet, Leonard, and Vita, Virginia became in make-believe some species of monkey. In childhood Virginia had enjoyed visiting the London Zoo, watching the small monkeys cling to their mothers, perhaps identifying with them.
The pleasure of embracing Violet Dickinson aroused ‘hot volcanic depths’ in Virginia.22 ‘I wish no more. My food is affection.’23 Some of her letters to Violet, like those to Vanessa, read like love letters but it is wrong to see the relationship in terms of adult sexuality. Virginia craved intimate mother-love, not the erotic.
Violet Dickinson must have been both surprised and gratified by Virginia’s passion; she was not alarmed and continued to provide the affection Virginia needed. Whether or not she had a lesbian side is entirely conjectural and rather beside the point. Virginia was neither looking nor ready for such a relationship.
Inevitably there were moments when Virginia’s emotional demands became too much, and Violet told her so. Virginia was only momentarily nonplussed: ‘a blessed hell-cat and an angel in one’, she declared, using her father’s imagery.24 But Virginia was by no means always all child in the relationship. She liked Violet as a person, and took a close interest in Violet’s life, talked over her difficulties, discussed books and the theatre and acquaintances in common. But it was as a mother-figure that she was most important to Virginia, and when this role ended so did their intimacy.
* * *
Leslie died on 22 February 1904. After the funeral the Stephens, with George Duckworth, went to Manorbier on the Pembrokeshire coast, which was not unlike St Ives, for a month. Virginia felt the loss acutely. She dreamt of her father and could not accept he was dead. She was tormented; she should have done more for him, told him of her devotion, demonstrated her love.
The group walked along the cliffs, and went on ‘queer little expeditions’ organised by George ‘to help pass the time’.25 Virginia clung to her family, for, when they were all together, Leslie, and Julia as well, seemed near. Outwardly they all got on but Virginia felt increasingly cut off and isolated. She could not speak to any of them about her grief. Thoby was too reserved, while Adrian, who had disliked and feared his father, was far from unhappy at his death. Vanessa, too, felt released and was enthusiastically organising everyone, planning to leave Hyde Park Gate and its past and take up new lives. It was, Virginia told Violet Dickinson, hard to listen and speak to them about her father: ‘You can’t think what a relief it is to have someone – that is you, because there isn’t anyone else to talk to.’26