by Peter Dally
Vanessa’s first child, Julian, was born on 4 February 1908. Vanessa developed postnatal depression, not bad enough to attract medical attention but sufficient to lower her self-confidence and leave her tired and worried. She was, in fact, depressed after each of her three pregnancies; a combination of genetic vulnerability and unhappy circumstances.
Clive’s reaction to his son’s arrival upset Vanessa. He was jealous and rejecting, constantly complaining of the time Vanessa gave to Julian, and how hideous the child was. Had Julian been a girl he might have behaved better. Vanessa believed a male child represented competition and brought out the worst in him. He complained of the noise, the mess, the incessant demands. He refused to hold the child and insisted on sleeping in a separate bedroom.
His behaviour was not unexpected, given his nature and background, but it opened Vanessa’s eyes to her husband’s immaturity. From then on, very slowly, their marriage deteriorated.
Vanessa’s depression only served to increase Clive’s fractiousness. Feeling inadequate as a mother, afraid of neglecting and failing the child, she fussed over him far more than was necessary and insisted on doing everything herself, wearing herself out. She became over-possessive of Julian, behaviour which was to endure and never failed to irk Virginia and irritate Clive.
Virginia’s response to Julian’s birth was lukewarm. The infant’s demands for immediate attention reflected her own need. She, not Julian, she maintained, was Vanessa’s ‘first born’.18 Once more she felt separated from her sister and her jealousy was barely hidden: ‘Its voice is too terrible … like an ill-omened cat. Nobody would wish to comfort it or pretend it was a human being.’19 Her exclusion from her sister’s life was painfully apparent, she told Clive: ‘I seem often to be only an erratic external force, capable of shock but without any lodging in your lives.’20
The flirtation between Clive and Virginia began when they were all on holiday at St Ives that May. Virginia had already begun to edge in that direction for, on 15 April, she wrote to Clive, ‘kiss her [Vanessa] most passionately in all my private places – neck, and arm, and eyeball, and tell her – what new thing is there to tell? How fond I am of her husband?’21
The St Ives boarding house echoed to the cries of Julian and the landlady’s noisy two-year-old son. Clive and Virginia took refuge in long walks together along the cliffs and across the moor. They talked of books, gossiped about friends, laughed and joked and set out to impress each other. Never before had they been alone together for so long. Clive was an amusing, stimulating companion and Virginia, when on form, was captivating. He was a natural flirt. Virginia was an attractive woman, and when elated she was irresistible. At a party fellow guests fell under her spell and, ‘listening to her, forgot love affairs, stayed on and on into the small hours.’22 She was flattered by Clive’s attention; ‘my head spins – I feel above the Gods,’ she told him.23
Clive has been blamed but it is just as likely that Virginia made the first moves and Clive responded. Thrown together, Vanessa tied down with Julian, it was almost inevitable they should become involved. Clive may have wanted to make love to Virginia but his conscience and, perhaps even more, the likely consequences of stirring strong emotions in Virginia stopped him. He had, after all, seen her in Paris just before she went mad in 1904, and observed her occasional wild flights of fantasy at Gordon Square.
However, Clive became deeply involved with Virginia, and eventually lost his way. What began as a lighthearted diversion from the trials of fatherhood turned into a disturbing obsession, which led ultimately to the breakdown of his marriage. He became restless and unsettled, wanting the unobtainable, pursuing the forbidden. He continued the pursuit but with no end in sight, and when Virginia offered to kiss him he backed away. Virginia was more amused than disappointed. Clive’s timidity reassured her that she was in control of the relationship. ‘We achieved the heights then,’ she told him triumphantly.24
Sexual exploration and sisterly rivalry played a part at first but, essentially, Virginia wanted to win back her sister. As time progressed Virginia began to see the relationship with Clive as a means of achieving this: to possess Clive’s love would be to possess her sister’s. Her thinking was childlike. In no way did she wish to separate husband and wife. She wanted simply to be part of their marriage, to love husband and wife as one. Clive would be the carrier of Virginia’s passion for her sister: ‘Kiss my yellow honeybee,’ she ordered him.25
Vanessa became aware of the entanglement before long and was hurt and angry. She felt betrayed by the two people she most trusted, and was confused as to their intentions. She now saw the moral weakness and self-indulgence at the centre of Clive’s easygoing nature, and her respect and affection waned. Virginia was the main offender in her eyes, although she was unsure whether her sister was being deliberately wicked or playing a fantasy game. She knew Virginia well enough to believe she was not in love with Clive and that there was no sexual intimacy, but that, if anything, only added to her exasperation. In the end she decided Virginia had created a make-believe world.
Vanessa withdrew and concentrated her affection on her son. She avoided any scene or direct confrontation with Clive or Virginia. She never mentioned the affair to either, for it was not in Vanessa’s nature to have rows. Her reaction to a painful event was always to withdraw and hide her feelings, to avoid angry scenes which could risk destroying important relationships. She preferred to suffer in silence rather than risk confrontation. Virginia would always be important to Vanessa and she would never cease to care for her, but from then on she was wary of her sister. In one important respect, Virginia and Clive shared a deep interest which did not concern Vanessa: literature. Clive introduced Virginia to the modern French novelists and she came to respect his opinion. This side of their relationship developed in a constructive way, free of neurotic complications, and before long she was talking to him of her problems with the novel.
She had begun to write ‘Melymbrosia’, which became The Voyage Out, at the end of 1907. It had been germinating for some time and, once started, she wrote with intensity, her imagination flowing. Clive was of great assistance when she ran into difficulties. He was an excellent critic, with no axe of his own to grind, and Virginia trusted him enough to show him each instalment of the first draft as completed.
Clive, like Violet Dickinson, believed in Virginia’s genius and he took immense pains over his criticism. Virginia needed to feel her novels had the backing of someone whose judgement she respected. Clive was hardly the father-figure Leonard Woolf was to become, but concerning ‘Melymbrosia’ Virginia saw him as a man of stature. ‘Ah, how you encourage me!’ she told him gratefully. ‘It makes all the difference.’26 Her genuine need for Clive’s encouragement complicated their affair, prolonged it and led Clive to mistake Virginia’s gratitude and partial dependence for deeper feelings.
Virginia was damaged by the involvement. The initial excitement soon gave way to a painful sense of guilt towards Vanessa: ‘that turned more of a knife in me than anything else has ever done.’27 Her cyclothymic swings were exacerbated; the intensified spells of depression in late winter and early spring, and hypomanic outbursts in summer, began to cause concern. She still had calm periods, but these too were liable to be disturbed by some incident with Clive that provoked jealousy and outbursts of temper. There was no one to intervene, to advise caution, to prevent the reinforcement of the mood cycle. Had Vanessa stood her ground, read the riot act and told Virginia to stop, the relationship might have ended at once. Virginia would have recognised reality and the harm she was doing to herself and her sister. She and Clive might have continued their co-operation on the novel but not their neurotic interplay.
Disaster is certain when a manic depressive is allowed to slide inexorably out of control. A manic depressive often knows he is helpless to halt the gathering storm, but will respond to firm intervention in the early stages. Vanessa, alas, unlike Leonard Woolf, was unable to act, and her passivity encoura
ged her sister’s destructive behaviour and fuelled manic depression.
In September 1908 Virginia went with the Bells to Tuscany. She was still mildly ‘high’ from the summer and on at least two occasions she and Clive ended up screaming at one another in the street, and rowing noisily when Virginia objected to his kissing Vanessa. She accompanied them again the following year to Florence but there were such ‘stormy squalls’ that she cut short the holiday and returned home alone.
At the end of that year, shortly before the spring melancholia, she became over-excited. On Christmas Eve she impulsively decided to go to Cornwall on her own for a few days, and it was soon after her return home that she was persuaded by her brother Adrian to join him and three friends in the Dreadnought Hoax.
A telegram was sent to HMS Dreadnought, the flagship of the British home fleet then anchored at Weymouth, advising the Admiral of a visit by the Emperor of Abyssinia and four of his entourage. The group, all disguised by dark greasepaint and wearing flowing robes, were met by a guard of honour at the station and escorted round the ship by the captain, Adrian being the interpreter and using what one sailor called ‘a rum lingo’. Virginia remained silent, which is perhaps why they escaped detection. They got back safely and all would have been well had not one of the party informed the press, whereupon a storm broke over their heads.
Knowing Virginia’s vulnerable state, Vanessa had tried to dissuade Virginia from taking part but to no avail. By March Virginia was on the verge of a breakdown: headaches, insomnia, reluctance to eat, and explosive irritability. Vanessa summoned Dr Savage and on his advice she and Clive took Virginia to Studland for rest and quiet.
The improvement was short-lived and, as summer neared, signs of hypomania, mixed with depression, began to appear. Vanessa, who was in the final months of her second pregnancy (perhaps a last attempt to keep her marriage going) was by now very anxious. Again acting on Dr Savage’s advice, she and Clive took Virginia to a rented house near Canterbury, but she continued to cause alarm; excitement and agitation were followed by exhaustion, ‘numbness and headache’. Vanessa returned to London after a fortnight to prepare for the delivery, leaving Clive and Virginia together, hardly an ideal arrangement. She spoke to Savage who, persuaded of the danger, arranged for Virginia to enter Miss Thomas’s nursing home at Twickenham for a ‘slightly modified’ rest cure. Virginia reluctantly agreed, and several times during the six weeks’ treatment she threatened to leave. ‘I really don’t think I can stand much more of this,’ she wrote to Vanessa at one stage, ‘all this eating and drinking and being shut up in the dark … in bed alone here for four weeks.’28
But she put on weight and was considered well enough to leave in mid-August. Accompanied by Miss Thomas – who seems to have been captivated by her patient – she went to Cornwall on a three-week walking convalescence. She was still unstable and liable to a ‘bad night’, or a sudden flight of fantastic ideas, but insight and self-control were slowly returning. She wrote to Clive from Gurnards Head, ‘I feel a great mastery over the world. My conclusion upon marriage might interest you. So happy I am it seems a pity not to be happier.’29 A week later she joined the Bells at Studland. Despite a furious row there with Clive, provoked by him, she continued to improve and returned to London in October. Chastened by the breakdown and now conscious of the risk she was running, she heeded Dr Savage’s warning that London life would soon unsettle her, and began searching for a country ‘refuge’. She found Little Talland House in Firle, near Lewes, and thus began her association with East Sussex and the Downs.
Chapter Seven
Gender and Sexuality
Quentin Bell was born on 19 August 1910. There were no complications but Vanessa was tired and depressed and glad of the customary month in bed, relieved that Virginia would be in Cornwall for most of the lying-in period. Throughout the pregnancy she had watched her sister slipping towards madness, comforting her one moment and having to defend herself against abuse and ‘uncontrolled passion’ the next. Clive, although recognising that Virginia was ill, had done little to support his wife and relieve the pressure. His tolerance for stressful problems was low, and Vanessa’s only ally in the struggle had been Dr Savage.
A month of rest and relative quiet gave Vanessa time to reflect on her current life. She saw it was unsatisfactory; she had too little time to paint, Clive did not provide the companionship and support she wanted, and, above all, the strain of Virginia was becoming almost unbearable. Much as she loved Virginia she could not continue to mother her at the cost of her own family and career. But she could see no solution and, characteristically, displaced her worries onto the new child, convinced he was failing to eat and losing weight. The doctors did not understand what lay behind her obsession and Clive, of course, was a broken reed, unable to bear Quentin’s cries. Vanessa grew ever more miserable and distraught. It was at this low point that Roger Fry entered her life.
She had met him earlier in 1910. At the age of 44 he had also reached a crisis point in his life; his wife had developed schizophrenia, from which she would not recover, and he had recently resigned from his post as buyer to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Enormously energetic and enthusiastic and never at a loose end for long, Fry had arranged an exhibition of contemporary European art – including artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin, Cézanne, little known in England at that time – to be held in London at the Grafton Galleries. The first exhibition of Post-Impressionist paintings opened in November to a mixed chorus of abuse and praise and created an immediate sensation.
Both Bells, but particularly Clive, were involved in helping with the exhibition, and during that autumn Roger Fry was a frequent visitor to Gordon Square. One evening, when Clive was away and Vanessa and Roger were alone together, she discovered ‘something of his power of sympathy’, and on a sudden impulse unburdened herself to him.1 The relief was enormous, and the effect long-reaching.
A growing intimacy and companionship with Fry, together with the excitement of the exhibition, temporarily lifted Vanessa’s gloom:
that autumn … everything seemed springing to new life … all was a sizzle of excitement, new relationships, new ideas, different and intense emotions all seemed crowding into one’s life. Perhaps I did not realise then how much Roger was at the centre of it all.2
Roger Fry fell in love at once. Vanessa moved more cautiously and at first would not admit to herself she loved Roger. That April she and Clive travelled to Turkey with him to look at Byzantine art. At Broussa Vanessa collapsed after a supposed miscarriage. In all probability, the conflicts and strain of the journey brought out lurking depression and, coinciding with premenstrual tension and heavy bleeding, released panic attacks. Breathless and hyperventilating, she was terrified and unable to move, but in no danger. Roger seems to have recognised this. He took charge and quickly calmed her and restored order.
Virginia was at home when she heard the news and, fearing the worst, hurried to Constantinople. There she found her sister prostrate but tranquil, being nursed by Roger and preparing to return home on the Orient Express.
Vanessa’s depression lasted over two years. The emotional conflicts which had released the ‘black Stephen madness’, required time for resolution. During this period she came to love Roger passionately. She leant heavily on him, relying on his judgement and understanding, and put herself into his care. She trusted him implicitly and allowed herself to love him. The emotional turmoil eased and she released herself from Clive. For as long as possible she kept the affair hidden and the marital break-up, never total, was gradual.
Clive reacted predictably to Roger’s intrusion with jealous outbursts and demands that Roger stay away from Gordon Square, but his attempts to regain Vanessa’s affection were wasted. She wanted her marriage to continue, for conventional and financial reasons, but only on an asexual basis. She wanted Clive to remain a husband in name and to stay within the family circle, but nothing more. She succeeded. The Bells never divorced.
> Virginia was quick to detect what was happening, and regarded the relationship with surprise and some disapproval at first. Her first thought was that once again she had lost her sister, for Vanessa had become more reserved, partly because of depression but also for fear of Virginia influencing Roger. But this time Vanessa had no cause for alarm. Roger’s attachment as unassailable.
* * *
Virginia’s interest in Clive waned steadily, although his continued for her, but they remained close friends. Throughout the summer of 1911 she was restless and her behaviour erratic, moving between depression and hypomanic excess. Vanessa no longer attempted to watch over her and Virginia was left with no protector. She bathed naked in the Cam with Rupert Brooke (it was an innocent outing), and fraternised with the ‘Neo-Pagans’, squabbled with Adrian and contemplated living away from him. She finished the seventh or eighth draft of her novel. She seemed to be going nowhere. She was ‘29 and unmarried – a failure’.3