by Peter Dally
Leonard’s early ambition to write novels had had to be abandoned at the outbreak of the war, and later on he came to recognise he was better suited to writing about politics and world affairs. None of that brought in much money and most of Leonard’s income in the early years of marriage, which was supplemented by Virginia’s trust income of about £300 a year plus what she earned, came from journalism and reviewing.
Vanessa and Clive had partially separated during Virginia’s breakdown. In 1916 Clive was living on his own at Gordon Square, and Vanessa had moved, with her sons, to Suffolk to be near the painter Duncan Grant. She was still very tied to Roger Fry but their sexual relationship had ended, with some bitterness on his part. As Vanessa had recovered from the long drawn-out depression she had become increasingly drawn to Duncan, and when he responded – partly, one suspects, because an affair with Adrian Stephen was finishing and being replaced by one with David Garnett – she fell in love. Duncan and Garnett were fruit picking on a Suffolk farm in the hope of avoiding conscription into the army.
Virginia missed her sister deeply; the stimulation provided by their rivalry, their understanding and affection for each other, the laughter and sense of the absurd – what Leonard called silliness – and the scandalous gossip which set Virginia’s fantasies flying. She made Vanessa promise to write at least twice a week, and before long she was badgering her to leave Suffolk and move to Sussex near her.
She and Leonard visited Vanessa in the summer, and at once Virginia felt more alive and her imagination moved into a higher gear. Ideas for Night and Day began to form, with Vanessa the model for Katharine Hilbery. ‘It’s fatal staying with you, you start so many new ideas’, Virginia told her.14 ‘You stimulate the literary sense in me as you say I do your painting.’15
Leonard never inspired a novel, although he provided Virginia with the outline of several characters – Peter Walsh in Mrs Dalloway, Louis in The Waves – but, much more important, he gave her the consistent background against which she could develop her writing. Without Leonard there would have been no Virginia Woolf as we know her.
Virginia searched the Sussex countryside and found a farmhouse to rent within easy bicycling distance of Asham, just a mile from Firle; very solid and simple with ‘flat walls in that lovely mixture of brick and flint’,16 the perfect house for Vanessa’s needs. It was Charleston. Vanessa needed little persuasion, and when Duncan Grant and David Garnett obtained exemption from military service she moved there with them in October.
Leonard had mixed feelings about Vanessa living on their doorstep. He thought her too scatty, frivolous, and liable to make her sister dangerously excited. He recognised Virginia’s need for Vanessa and their mutual devotion, but he was afraid she might undermine Virginia’s stability. He also disapproved of the ménage à trois, not so much on moral grounds but because he foresaw the difficulties Vanessa would be facing, and feared these would rub off on Virginia.
Leonard’s disapproval was soon noticed by Vanessa. She wrote to Lytton Strachey:
I think the Woolves have a morbid terror of us all – I can’t think why. They seem to think we should contaminate the atmosphere and bring wicked gaieties into Virginia’s life. If they could only see the quiet lives we lead! Surely the downs are wide enough for us all and they needn’t fear a constant flow in and out of Asham a long as Woolf is in it.17
Lytton was inclined to agree: there was ‘some pollution theory in the background’ of Leonard’s mind.18
The tension between Leonard and Vanessa never came into the open or disturbed Virginia. Subconsciously it may have pleased her, since it meant Vanessa could not touch her relationship with Leonard. Vanessa might mutter about Leonard’s lack of humour and his seriousness, and Leonard would criticise Vanessa’s friends or the frequency with which the Bell children visited and disturbed the peace – but not enough to upset Virginia. She remained well, and cyclothymia was no more than a gentle swell in 1916 and 1917.
However, depression at the beginning of 1918 was unusually severe and sent her to bed for more than a week. Leonard was vexed to discover she had lost weight, and despite the problems of wartime rationing, organised extra milk and took her to Asham to rest. She was out of action for almost a month. Leonard attributed most of it to Virginia finishing Night and Day, but the significant stress probably originated from Vanessa, who was desperately trying to become pregnant; she wanted a son by Duncan, and that March she conceived.
Clive was officially the father, and that pretence was kept up for nearly twenty years, even to the child. Virginia probably learnt the truth in the last three or four months of the pregnancy. She was always disturbed by Vanessa’s pregnancies. On this occasion, once her depression had passed, Virginia wrote prolifically all through 1918. She finished Night and Day in November at a gallop, and new ideas and stories followed, almost as if Virginia had to give birth to her literary children before Vanessa.
Angelica was born on Christmas morning at Charleston. Vanessa had anticipated a boy – she thought Duncan would take more interest in a son – and was put out when a girl arrived. She had insisted on being delivered at home (the colours of her bedroom were so much more sympathetic than those of the nursing home), but conditions verged on the chaotic. New servants were unreliable; one had to be dismissed for stealing, and a nurse left the day she arrived, horrified by what she encountered.
Vanessa had not been well during the pregnancy. She had quarrelled with Roger, who was still bitter at being ousted, and in September she threatened to miscarry. Halfway through the pregnancy Duncan told her that sexually their relationship was at an end, and he was not in love with her. She was left unsupported, anxious and liable to bouts of breathlessness and panic.
Virginia had promised to have Julian and Quentin for the first fortnight of the confinement, but signs of depression began immediately. She complained of toothache, a tooth was immediately extracted, headache followed, and she was in bed for much of January. The boys had to go to their father in Gordon Square.
Vanessa’s depression came to focus on the infant. She was convinced the baby’s crying was due to serious indigestion, and demanded the child be given castor oil and grey powders (a mixture of mercury and chalk). The doctor refused, a row built up, and in the end a more understanding female doctor was found who calmed mother and child. It was several months before Vanessa regained her composure, and Leonard would not allow Virginia to visit until early March.
Virginia’s depression was followed by mild hypomania – the pattern that occurred after Julian’s birth – and in her fantasy she took over Angelica. She suggested the name and went on to say, ‘she is going to think me something more than an Aunt – not quite a father perhaps, but with a hand (to put it delicately) in her birth’.19
Hypomania persisted for much of that summer The lease on Asham had come to an end and Virginia, searching for a replacement, heard of cottages to rent near St Ives that D. H. Lawrence had once lived in; without seeing them she immediately made an offer. As a weekend holiday home the distance from London made the scheme wholly impractical and the plan was soon dropped.
A few weeks later Virginia went to Charleston and quarrelled with Vanessa over ‘Kew Gardens’. Vanessa, who had illustrated the book, complained that the production was shoddy and she would not illustrate any more of Virginia’s books; in her opinion ‘an ordinary printer’ was preferable to the Hogarth Press.20 Virginia was ‘stung and chilled’ by the attack, and in a fury, hypomanic and resentful, rushed into Lewes and recklessly bought the Round House, a converted windmill beside the castle wall. It was not at all what the Woolfs wanted – it lacked a ‘country garden’ – but she bought it on the spot, barely stopping to look at the house, with no thought of consulting Leonard beforehand.
Leonard was outwardly polite and reasonable, but as he made his reservations felt Virginia’s ebullience ebbed, and she began to regret her impulsiveness. On the way to show Leonard the Round House, they saw an estate agent’s notic
e announcing the forthcoming sale of Monks House, Rodmell, a small village nearby. It seemed like a message from heaven: ‘An old-fashioned house standing in three-quarters of an acre of land to be sold with possession’. ‘That would have suited us exactly,’ Leonard said regretfully, and Virginia at once determined to make amends.21 She went next day to Rodmell, where she found a run-down house in much need of repair: small rooms, narrow stairs, an outside WC, no bath or hot water, but attractive views and surroundings and a pretty garden. Leonard could become ‘a fanatical lover of that garden’, Virginia immediately thought, and Leonard agreed. They bought the house for £700 and moved there in September, by good luck disposing of the Round House without loss.
Leonard’s tactful handling of the episode was immensely reassuring to Virginia. He had not been angry or rejecting; on the contrary he had discussed his feelings in the most reasonable manner and never once upbraided her. Her sense of security was reinforced by their joint purchase of Monks House.
Leonard’s life had become dominated by politics and international events. His work on the causes of war and colonial problems had made him a name, and he was firmly in the Labour Party camp. He believed passionately in the need for collective security and worldwide disarmament, and he saw capitalism and the Conservative Party as the opponent. He was convinced that if nations continued in their old nationalistic ways another world war was inevitable and civilisation would be extinguished. He held his belief in the League of Nations as fanatically as Virginia’s great-grandfather Jem Stephen had believed in the abolition of slavery.
In May 1920 he agreed to stand ‘rather half-heartedly for Parliament’, as Labour Party candidate for the combined English Universities. He had initially hesitated because becoming a Member of Parliament seemed ‘the acme of futility and boredom … his only function being to record his vote at the next division’,22 but his reservations also reflected doubts about the possible effect on Virginia. Her health influenced all his decisions; at various times he refused invitations to India and Africa, which he would have accepted but for fear of destabilising her.
Although neither Virginia nor Leonard said so, she was unenthusiastic about his undertaking a parliamentary career. It was obvious to that astute observer Beatrice Webb, who took Virginia to task at a luncheon party she gave in February and told her firmly, ‘it was wrong to prevent Leonard from going into Parliament.’23
However, when Leonard was a candidate Virginia supported him, although she did little to hide her dislike when she accompanied him to Manchester to meet his constituents. She ridiculed the statue of Queen Victoria in the square ‘looking like a large tea cosy’, and laughed at Wellington, ‘sleek as a mastiff with paw extended’; everyone she met was ‘lower middle class, no sprinkling of upper class’; the dons and their wives had ‘no surface brilliancy, not a scrap of romance’. Why had she come? she was asked; ‘Oh, for the fun of spending £10 in Manchester and seeing the zoo.’ Had she been ‘a scatterbrain’ she asked herself when she returned home? Yes, but then none of the Mancunians had read her books.24
Virginia was beginning slowly to mature and become aware of some ill-defined need for a more sensual love, akin to her love for Vanessa, to supplement but not replace Leonard’s love. ‘If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men,’ she wrote in her diary.25 It was not so much sex she was seeking as an intimate relationship which ‘managed to make life seem a little amusing and interesting and adventurous.’26 Katherine Mansfield, with her vivid past, attracted her, but Katherine was too elusive and ill for Virginia to grasp.
Ottoline Morrell seemed a possibility. She was the sister of the Duke of Portland, and had ‘the head of a Medusa’.27 She was six feet tall and angular, with equine-like teeth, but she had great charm and her striking appearance was exaggerated by flamboyant clothes and vast hats, and rather badly dyed red hair. This eccentric woman, renowned for her parties and generosity, had ‘something Elizabethan’ about her and was fascinating to many people. She had a number of lovers, including Bertand Russell, and liked to surround herself with creative individuals.
She and Virginia, who was nine years younger, had first met in 1909. Then, Virginia had sung her praises to Vanessa, to be warned that Ottoline was known for her lesbian tendencies. It was untrue but it added to her attractions.
After her breakdown, Virginia resumed the friendship and was much taken with her.
I was so much overcome by her beauty, that I really felt as if I’d suddenly got into the sea and heard the mermaids fluting on their rocks … she has red-gold hair in masses, cheeks as soft as cushions with a lovely deep crimson on the crest of them, and a body shaped more after my notion of a mermaid’s than I’ve ever seen … swelling but smooth [she told Vanessa].28
Ottoline, who had a protective side, was intrigued by Virginia and encouraged the friendship, but she was too woolly a thinker for Virginia’s taste, nor did she want to step into the role of maternal protector. By 1925 Virginia was ‘rather overcome by her ravaged beauty and desperation, and humility’,29 and by then she was already becoming involved with Vita Sackville-West.
Chapter Eleven
Creativity
The years 1920–25 were years of change for Virginia. It was an intensely creative period. Virginia’s experiments with short stories led on to Jacob’s Room; ‘to have the same rhythmic flow as the short stories, one thing opening out of another: a kind of tunnelling process’. She wrote Jacob’s Room between April 1920 and November 1921, despite interruptions through illness, and began ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ the following April, a short story which grew into Mrs Dalloway.
Despite or perhaps partly because of this creative activity and progress, during 1921 and 1922 Virginia was continually beset with tension symptoms and depression and had to spend much time in bed. She rested for most of the summer of 1921:
with wearisome headache, jumping pulse, aching back, frets, fidgets, lying awake, sleeping draughts, sedatives, digitalis, going for a little walk and plunging back into bed again – all the horror of the dark cupboard of illness once more displayed for my diversions.
But like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she recognised that illness had its compensations:
to be tired and authorised to lie in bed is pleasant … I can take stock of things in a leisurely way. Then the dark underworld has its fascinations as well as its terrors.1
By that autumn she was feeling well, but three months later, in January, cyclothymia caused her ‘to tumble into bed with the influenza’ and, for the next eight months, one symptom continually followed another.2 Her temperature rose and fell, her heart raced, pains racked her body. Organic disease was sought and she saw a variety of specialists. One found a focus of septic infection which he was sure was the source of the trouble and pulled out three healthy teeth. Microbes were swabbed and grown from her throat and made into a vaccine, which was then injected into her. Tuberculosis was suspected and ‘they vaccinated a guinea pig with my spittle. It died’,3 but not from TB. Heart and lung diseases were incriminated. Her general practitioner, who may have privately suspected a psychological cause, protected her from more draconian measures. Gradually in 1923 the tension lifted and apart from a short-lived but alarming mad episode in October, Virginia remained well until the affair with Vita Sackville-West developed in 1925.
None of the specialists suggested a psychological cause for Virginia’s ill health. Maurice Craig acknowledged that the mind could affect ‘any or all of the organs of the body’, but he was not consulted at this particular time.4 He might have saved the Woolfs their fees, but he is unlikely to have uncovered the psychological cause. He never discussed Virginia’s feelings with her, but concentrated his attention on weight and sleeping habits. He looked on fatigue as a major cause of mental illness, for it permitted ‘toxins to invade the system, and a vicious circle of cause and effect was formed’. The yearly attack of influenza, Craig expl
ained to Virginia, ‘poisoned her nervous system’. Sleep was ‘the only certain means of restoring wastage’ and he advocated the liberal use of hypnotics. He advised her always to have a sleeping draught at the bedside ‘to take at the least wakefulness’.5 She obeyed, but later on was often reluctant to do so because of the drug’s after-effects, which included ‘a head like wood’ and made ‘our breakfast fiery’.6 But perhaps that was better than the exhaustion which followed a sleepless night. She told her friend, the composer Ethel Smyth, ‘I did not take chloral at 4.30 this morning – but lay wide-eyed; and rather doubt if chloral isn’t the less drugging of the two.’7
Craig was not alone in avoiding discussion of the emotions, for that had long been the habit of psychiatrists. Although the isolation that was part of a rest cure usually resulted in a patient developing a strong dependence, the doctor was expected to remain god-like and detached, avoiding emotional subjects and restricting himself to rules for a healthy future life.
By the 1920s psychodynamic ideas were beginning to penetrate British psychiatry, but Craig had little time for them. He ‘left psychoanalysis to its particular exponents, and would content himself with suggesting that many of the patients they claimed to have cured would probably have shown as good or better results under some other treatment.’8
Virginia never became dependent on any doctor, certainly not Craig. She accepted him because Leonard respected and regarded him as ‘the leading Harley Street specialist in nervous and mental diseases’.9 Having succeeded Savage to the prestigious post of psychiatrist to Guy’s Hospital, he had built up the largest consulting practice of his time. He looked the part: a distinguished man, ‘tastefully neat’ in his dress, authoritative and sure of himself, a thoroughly conventional doctor.10
Virginia could never have opened herself up to Craig. He represented everything she hated about bullying male authority. She fused him with Savage, and the two became Sir William Bradshaw in Mrs Dalloway: