The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

by Peter Dally

  * * *

  He returned to the family home in Putney. Almost nothing had changed in his absence: there was the same surburban atmosphere, thick dark curtains, heavy furniture, the photographs and porcelain knick-knacks, his brothers and sisters joking and disputing, all presided over by his mother radiating ‘rosy sentimentality’. A ‘mixture of reality and unreality, of familiarity and strangeness’. overcame him.9 Sitting at the dinner table that first evening he felt claustrophobic and homesick for Ceylon. In his mind’s eye he saw the large open room of his Hambantota bungalow, and heard the waves of the Indian Ocean pounding the shore below. The walls of the Putney dining room closed in on him and, for a moment, he thought to catch the next boat back. He felt unsure of himself, who he was or what he was doing there. He forced himself to concentrate his thoughts. He was home, the responsible Jewish boy, the good son who had proved himself and become a sahib, his mother’s pride and joy; but the acclaimed Administrator of Hambantota seemed far off.

  Cambridge and the Apostles were soon in the forefront of his thoughts, and three days after the homecoming he went up to Cambridge to stay with Lytton Strachey and renew friendships. Initially, Leonard was apprehensive, fearing he had changed and become a dull being, but Lytton welcomed back the friend who had been ‘absolute Lord of ten million blacks in the middle of the desert’, with open arms.10 Leonard had not changed at all, Lytton declared, apart from his ‘long, drawn, weather-beaten face’ and habit of speaking ‘very slowly, like one re-risen from the tomb – or rather on the other side of it’.11 He went to a gathering of the Society and immediately found himself back in the familiar stimulating environment he had left behind in 1904; the same friends, almost the same intellectual disputes. Leonard’s gloom vanished overnight. He sought out his old acquaintances, including Moore, and was infinitely reassured to find them ‘unchanged and unchanging’, holding to the same truths and values.

  Leonard decided to forget his doubts about Ceylon and his future and for the first six months of leave give himself up to enjoyment. He spent a week walking on Dartmoor with Lytton and Moore, and three weeks in Scandinavia with his brother Edgar. The remainder of 1911 was a time of ‘unmitigated, pure, often acute, pleasure’, such as he ‘had never had before’. Much of this pleasure came from his growing friendship with Virginia, Clive and Vanessa.

  Leonard dined with Vanessa and Clive in Gordon Square on 3 July, three weeks after his arrival home, and afterwards Virginia, Duncan Grant and Walter Lamb joined them for coffee and talk. It was, Leonard later decided, ‘the beginning of what came to be called “Bloomsbury”’.

  Leonard was captivated by what he found at Gordon Square. When he had last dined there in 1904 with Thoby and his sisters, the atmosphere had been formal and reserved. It was ‘wonderfully different’ in 1911, freer, more friendly, less inhibited. Leonard felt immediately accepted, at once on intimate terms with the Bells, taken into a society, unimaginable in Ceylon, where people said exactly what they thought on any topic, be it literature or sex, and women participated as passionately and freely as men. Formality was banished, everyone was on first name terms, and kisses were preferred to handshakes.

  The contrast between the Stephen sisters in 1906 – so aloof and reserved and, to Leonard, almost unapproachable – and the witty, friendly women Leonard encountered in 1911 amazed him at first. Eight years earlier he had secretly fallen in love with Vanessa, partly because of her looks – her features were ‘more perfect, her eyes bigger and better, her complexion more glowing’12 than Virginia’s – but mainly because she looked so like her brother Thoby and possessed something of his ‘monolithic’ aura. Thoby had been a close friend. His imposing presence and immensely good nature had made him an object of hero worship to many of his friends, including Lytton Strachey. Leonard’s admiration contained little or no homosexual attraction but it did include envy of Thoby’s family background. Meeting his sisters and father in Thoby’s rooms in 1903 had been an unforgettable experience, and when he learnt of Thoby’s death in 1906, he had felt a huge sense of loss, for Thoby was ‘above everyone in his nobility’.13

  Leonard’s interest in Vanessa in 1903 had been little more than a reflection of his feelings for Thoby and all that he represented. Brother and sister symbolised an ideal world, one where he might live by writing, surrounded by like-minded friends. Virginia had scarcely registered with Leonard at that time; she was simply Vanessa’s sister. When he met her again in 1904, just before leaving for Ceylon, she had been silent and gloomy and left little impression.

  Lytton had kept Leonard up to date on all the Stephens while in Ceylon. He knew of Vanessa’s marriage to Clive Bell, but not until 1909 did Virginia become of interest. Then, Lytton had mischievously written of Virginia’s entanglement with Clive and described the holiday she and the Bells had had in Italy, adding,

  That little canary-coloured creature we knew at Trinity … how does he manage to attract the two most beautiful and witty women in England.14

  Three months later Lytton suggested Leonard should marry Virginia before it was too late. Amused but intrigued, Leonard wrote back, ‘Do you think Virginia would have me? Wire to me if she accepts. I’ll take the next boat home.’ To his astonishment he then learnt Lytton had himself proposed marriage to Virginia, been accepted, and immediately ‘got out of it … it would be death if she accepted me.’15

  Lytton now redoubled his urgings to Leonard to marry Virginia, as though his proxy. ‘Marry her’, he urged. ‘If you came and proposed, she’d accept. You would be great enough and you’ll have the immense advantage of physical desire.’16 Leonard was too busy in the jungle and by-ways of Hambantota to take the matter any further. Perhaps he would propose when he returned home on leave but, he told Lytton with some prescience, marriage holds such ‘ghastly complications’.17

  Leonard had a strong heterosexual drive, unlike many of his Apostolic friends, with no overt homosexual leanings. Ceylon began his sexual education. Young civil servants were expected to copulate but not to marry or become engaged, and Leonard followed tradition. He had sex with prostitutes and one or two outlandish but enthusiastic women and, for a time, shared his bungalow with a concubine, but he was always troubled by post-orgasmic depression, the plunge from violent pleasure into despair, and he worried over separating love from lust. He had ‘an absurd, amusing and romantic affair’18 with the seventeen-year-old wife of a ‘boring Ceylon planter’,19 but when it ended he concluded it was degrading to be in love, ‘since 99 per cent of it is always the desire to copulate, otherwise it is only the shadow of itself’.20

  Leonard was attractive to women, not least because he enjoyed the ‘undiluted female mind, as well as … the female body’. Women, he believed, were gentler, more sensitive, more civilised than men, and he liked communicating, listening and experiencing ‘the female quality of mind’. Once only, in Kandy, was Leonard near falling in love, with the teenage daughter of a tea planter, but again he found the relationship ‘pretty degrading’, and he had to ‘behave like a gentleman’ lest he be pushed into marriage.21

  Increasingly, however, he saw that marriage could rescue him from his loneliness and depression. Others, apart from Lytton, thought the same. Leonard’s sister Bella took him to task and told him he required ‘someone to turn to’ to relieve his gloom and recommended ‘a very special sort of girl … strong-minded and clever and a sense of humour. If you marry a weak character, you’ll squash her. You must marry someone who can hold her own with you and yet be good-tempered.’22

  Perhaps Leonard remembered that advice when he entered Gordon Square. He was certainly well primed, and he was immediately drawn to Virginia. Virginia was, in turn, interested in Leonard and, encouraged by Vanessa, invited him for a weekend at her cottage in Firle. Leonard was committed to other arrangements and had to refuse, but the idea of marriage was already in his mind, for on holiday he told his brother about Virginia and discussed the problems marriage would bring. On returning home, Leonard
engineered another invitation from Virginia and on 16 September, together with Marjorie Strachey, Lytton’s sister, and Desmond McCarthy (an Apostle and friend of Moore) he went down to Firle for the weekend.

  Their friendship prospered. In November Virginia moved with Adrian into a four-storey house in Brunswick Square, and arranged to let out the top floor to Leonard. By now Leonard was in love. He felt a deep affinity with Virginia. They thought alike and had the same ideals. Each wanted to write. Both rejected religion and bourgeois values and wanted a ‘civilised’ life. They were, Leonard believed, ‘mind to mind and soul to soul’.23

  Leonard decided on marriage. If Virginia accepted, he would resign from the Colonial Service; if she refused he would return to Ceylon. He proposed to her on 11 January 1912. Virginia procrastinated; she was unsure and must have time. What Leonard did not know was that the Spring Melancholia was gathering force, heightening her anxiety and reinforcing her uncertainty. Depression gathered and at the end of January, unable to sleep, headachy and agitated, she was forced to spend a week in bed. She was still unwell and very erratic in mood when, with Vanessa, she gave two housewarming parties at Asham, a remote old farmhouse near Firle on which the sisters had just obtained a five-year lease. Her behaviour worsened. Savage was consulted, and Virginia went back to the Twickenham nursing home for ten days’ rest. Visitors and letters were forbidden, and Leonard’s first news of Virginia’s progress was a hypomanic note, written immediately after her return to Brunswick Square:

  I shall tell you wonderful stories of the lunatics. Bye the bye, they’ve elected me King. There can be no doubt about it. I summoned a conclave and made a proclamation about Christianity.24

  It was funny, but just a little bizarre.

  No alarm bell seems to have rung for Leonard, although he knew about the 1904 breakdown. He was already too committed to Virginia to draw back, and he considered Virginia’s behaviour to be due to ‘nerves’, which would calm down once she decided about marriage. She simply needed more time. By now Leonard’s leave was almost up. He applied for an extension but, because he refused to give a reason, this was withheld. On 25 April, encouraged by a letter from Virginia, he took the plunge and resigned from the Ceylon Civil Service although, he told Virginia, he expected no decision from her until she had finished The Voyage Out. He was certain she loved him.

  Leonard’s resignation – finally accepted on 7 May – helped Virginia make up her mind. He had given up a brilliant career for her sake, proof enough of the strength of his love, despite knowing her to be so difficult to live with and so very intemperate. But even more important was her improving state of mind. As the summer hypomania neared, her spirits rose and her anxieties lessened. On 29 May she told Leonard she would marry him.

  Virginia was thirty years old, ‘getting on a bit’, as the Stephen matrons would have told one another, and she did not want to find herself ‘a melancholy old maid’. She was often exasperated living with Adrian, but the prospect of living alone was worse. She was still attractive – an old friend, Sydney Waterlow, had proposed marriage only two months before Leonard – but Leonard was the first man since Lytton to whom she could imagine being married. What was also important was Vanessa’s approval.

  Vanessa was utterly weary of bearing the responsibility of watching over Virginia. She believed marriage to the right man would give her sister stability, and she had strong backing from Dr Savage. Leonard impressed her as ‘one of the most remarkable and charming people I know’. She did all she could to encourage Virginia, at the same time telling Leonard he was ‘the only person I know whom I can imagine as her husband.’25

  Virginia’s elated mood at the end of May made her confident and decisive and allowed her to say ‘yes’ to Leonard, but below the surface strong anxieties remained.

  No sooner had she decided than she began to see Leonard as having Jekyll and Hyde identities. On the one hand she saw Leonard as sensitive and protective, strong, firm, trustworthy, an ideal companion, devoted to her, having much in common with her lovable, literary father and her adored brother Thoby, one of his ‘great friends’. She told Violet Dickinson, ‘There is something very like Thoby about him, not only in his face. I feel I shall get fearfully spoilt.’26

  This idealised brother/father figure could be replaced in Virginia’s mind, when anxious, by an unpleasant image of masculine brutality, male lust for power, threatening. She recalled Thoby’s description of Leonard, ‘A Jew … so violent, so savage’,27 and Lytton telling her Leonard was like Swift and would murder his wife. She alternated between ‘being half in love’ and wanting to be with Leonard, and the ‘extreme of coldness and aloofness’.28

  She soon brought up her anxiety about sex, and told Leonard she felt no physical attraction; when he kissed her she went cold. The strength of Leonard’s desire frightened her; ‘Is it the sexual side which comes between us?’ she asked.29 Leonard looked on Virginia’s frigidity as little more than the customary behaviour of an upper-class English virgin, but he held himself back despite his desire for her having ‘grown far more violent as my other feelings have grown stronger’.30 Virginia’s tension eased and soon they were addressing one another by the pet names of ‘Mongoose’ (Leonard) and ‘Mandril’.

  Virginia was no more anti-Semitic than most of her class. She and Vanessa and their friends were all liable to make remarks that today would be offensive but were then taken as amusing rather than malicious. As late as 1930 Virginia was capable of telling Ethel Smyth that Jews ‘pullulate, copulate and amass … millions of money’,31 yet when Hitler came to power three years later she vehemently condemned Nazi anti-Semitism.

  That the Jew, as an outsider, is a ready-made scapegoat needs no emphasis. Virginia for a time came to link Leonard’s Jewishness with his sexuality; ‘I feel angry, sometimes, at the strength of your desire’, she told him. ‘Possibly your being a Jew comes in also at this point. You seem so foreign.’32 Such an attitude could not continue if the engagement was to survive. Virginia made a psychological leap and displaced her anxieties from Leonard onto his family. Henceforth, anti-Semitic remarks were reserved for them: ‘How I hated their nasal voices, and their oriental jewellery, and their noses and their wattles.’33 Her vitriol was directed particularly at Leonard’s mother who, Virginia sensed, wanted to dominate and put ‘her claws in me … the horror of family life and the terrible threat to one’s liberty that I used to feel with Father, Aunt Mary or George’ came back.34 Tension between the two women grew in the two months before marriage and culminated in a row, with Virginia refusing to have her future mother-in-law at the wedding. Marie Woolf was dreadfully upset; it was ‘an unheard-of slight’.35

  Leonard colluded with Virginia in what can only be described as a folie à deux. He sided with Virginia and, not unreasonably, Marie Woolf believed Virginia had taken Leonard away from his family. For Virginia, Leonard was no longer the threatening Jew. Now, when she described him to her friends he was transformed from the man who shot tigers, ‘hung black men’ and ruled Empires, into ‘a penniless Jew’.

  Virginia’s summer hypomania gave her energy and zest but led to exhaustion and tension. She and Leonard embarked on a round of visits and introductions to family and friends and, in addition, Virginia worked hard to finish the final draft of The Voyage Out. As insomnia and headaches developed, Leonard took charge for the first time, persuaded her to become ‘a comatose invalid’, and took her to Brighton for a recuperative weekend. He was by now ‘extremely uneasy’ about Virginia’s health and went to see George Savage. Dr Savage was very friendly, but impressed Leonard ‘much more as a man of the world than as a doctor’.36

  Savage was then 70 and at the top of his profession, having recently been knighted for his work, and elected the first president of the new section of psychiatry at the Royal Society of Medicine. He was an enthusiastic mountaineer, and his exploits in the Swiss Alps had resulted in his getting to know Leslie Stephen. His remarkable ascent of the Gablehorn from the Trift
Glacier at a time when Leslie was President of the Alpine Club was recorded in the Alpine Journal. For many years he was a member of the Sunday Tramps, which Leslie had founded, who would walk twenty or more miles a day.

  Savage dealt with Jim Stephen when Virginia’s cousin developed manic depression, and by the time Julia Stephen died he was well acquainted with most of the family. He may even have been asked for advice on Virginia in 1896 although no record of such exists. He treated Virginia through the 1904 breakdown and saw her, both socially and professionally, over the next eight years. Vanessa always went to Savage for help when worried by her sister’s mental state. She liked and respected him – as a family friend he would take no fees – but when she herself became depressed in 1911 she consulted a younger, more detached specialist, Maurice Craig, perhaps wisely recognising she was too close to Savage for his professional comfort.

  Savage was a competent, if not very imaginative, psychiatrist. His experience was wide, his opinions conventional, in line with those of the older, renowned Henry Maudsley. Although he modified some of his views for the twentieth century he still believed that women had weaker minds than men and ‘cannot be relieved of the duties of motherhood’. Too much education and mental activity were unhealthy for young females, liable to ‘develop into insanity’, and they were ‘peculiarly vulnerable to mental illness in puberty, menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth’.

  Savage had no doubt that ‘an insane or nervous disposition’ could be inherited, and believed that patients from ‘neurotic stock’ were liable to go ‘out of their minds’. Marriage should be forbidden to those with a history of periodical mental illness. ‘There is a grave risk in those adolescents who at puberty and with adolescence have periods of depression and buoyancy’, he wrote, and advised all those contemplating marriage to someone with such a history to think long and hard before deciding. As a footnote he added, ‘suppression of the facts as to such attacks should really be a ground for declaration of nullity’.37 He expressed this opinion only one year before his interview with Leonard.