by Peter Dally
In July 1931 Virginia pronounced ‘Potto’ – a primitive monkey, Vita’s nickname for her – to be dead. ‘You have not been for a month’, she told Vita, ‘and I date his decline from your last visit. As he died his last words were, “Tell Mrs Nick that I love her … she has forgotten me. But I forgive her.”’84 Potto revived at the last moment. The friendship continued, and although they met at decreasing intervals they remained important to one another. Vita’s words after Virginia’s suicide, ‘I might have saved her if only I had been there’,85 were not entirely an ignorant boast, although a mad Virginia, whom Vita had never known, would have been very different from the familiar Potto.
Between July 1929 and the summer of 1931 Virginia was writing The Waves. It was more difficult than anything she had attempted before; ‘the play-poem idea; the idea of some continuous stream, not solely of human thought, but of the ship, the night etc. all flowing together.’86 As she finished the book she knew, triumphantly, she had ‘netted that fin in the waste of waters’, which she had seen ‘passing far out’ on completing To the Lighthouse.87 The fin, rising from her subconscious depths, symbolised ‘something in the universe that one’s left with’.88 Writing the book was at times agonising but there were moments of ecstasy when she was carried outside herself. As she wrote the last ten pages she felt she was being taken over by huge universal forces; stumbling ‘after my own voice, or almost after some kind of speaker (as when I was mad). I was almost afraid, remembering the voices that used to fly ahead.’89
She wrote to a rhythm, not to a plot – she worried lest readers should find it incomprehensible. The rhythm of the waves on the seashore reflected, perhaps, the rhythm of the deep subcortical areas of her brain.
I like to flash and dash from side to side, goaded on by what I call reality [by which Virginia meant the subconscious]. If I never felt these extraordinary pervasive strains – of unrest, or rest, or happiness, or discomfort – I should float down into acquiescence. Here is something to fight: and when I wake early I say to myself, fight, fight. If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world [the subconscious] as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world.90
In creating The Waves Virginia dredged her mental depths: ‘one goes down into the well and nothing protects one from the assault of truth’.91 The first draft needed so much concentration; so many ideas kept welling up to be hammered into shape. Depression interrupted the work from time to time, but the breaks were valuable in solving the insoluble. When faced with a mental block she thought, ‘6 weeks in bed now would make a masterpiece’.92
Leonard regarded The Waves as a masterpiece, Virginia’s greatest book. Vanessa was ‘overcome by the beauty … it’s quite as real as having a baby or anything else, being moved as you have succeeded in moving me’.93 Her friend Ethel Smyth found it ‘profoundly disquieting, sadder than any book I ever read’.94 Only Vita thought it ‘boring in the extreme’.95 Virginia hid her disappointment in jocularity, and told Vita’s son that his mother believed ‘only a small dog that had been fed on gin could have written it’.96 Six weeks after the publication of The Waves, in October 1934, headaches and exhaustion forced Virginia to lead ‘a hermit’s life, without pleasure or excitement’, until the end of the year.97
Ethel Smyth was a well-known if minor composer when she swept into Virginia’s life in 1930 and became an important friend, providing love and adoration. Her warmth and interest in Virginia, feminism, honesty, intelligence and eccentricity, perhaps even her age, encouraged Virginia to bare her soul to Ethel. Ethel also had that essential ‘maternal quality, which of all others I need and adore … for that reason I chatter faster and freer to you than to other people’.98
Ethel was besotted by Virginia. Almost at once she made Virginia ‘a declaration of violent but platonic love’, she had ‘never loved anyone so much’.99 She was nearly 72 when they met, and deaf enough to need an ear trumpet. She had lesbian leanings but sex was never an issue in her relationship with Virginia. Convinced that her musical reputation had suffered through being a woman, she was an extraordinary being: massively built, with a huge head and a ‘humane, battered face’, egotistic, warmhearted and quarrelsome.
She helped to keep up Virginia’s morale as Vita retreated. For Ethel, Virginia came before everyone and anything else. When ill and confined to bed, Ethel rushed to her bedside. Virginia loved her for it: ‘I can’t tell you, Ethel, how I adored you for that dash here – for two hours only – how it kindled and enraptured me to have you by me.’100 She craved such affection, and formed a ‘limpet childish attachment’ to Ethel.
There were occasional setbacks. Once, Ethel sent Virginia a picture of a sick monkey, with a note telling her all her ills ‘spring from liver’, calomel would cure her. ‘After swallowing this terrific insult to the celebrated sensibility of my nervous system; Virginia forgave her.101
Chapter Thirteen
Threat of War
Leonard, through his committee work and writings, sought to widen the Labour party’s international and imperial horizons, and gain support for the League of Nations. He worked prodigiously hard; much of his aggression, and perhaps his sexual energy, were displaced into work. He rarely lost his temper, and his celibacy probably added to his ‘grimness’.
Until the 1930s the Parliamentary Labour party voted consistently for disarmament and measures to strengthen the League. The Party held power briefly in 1923 under Ramsay MacDonald, and again in 1929 when they came back as a minority government. Leonard’s hopes of radical change ended with the world financial crisis and the depletion of Britain’s gold reserves in 1931. The Cabinet split over proposed cuts in public expenditure, especially unemployment benefits, and Ramsay MacDonald resigned. A National Coalition government, made up largely of Conservatives, was formed next day with MacDonald at its head. Leonard was incensed by MacDonald’s ‘betrayal’ of the Party; there was never ‘a more treacherous man’. His despair was complete when the Labour Party was routed at the General Election that followed. They would remain weak and divided for years to come.
Leonard barely had time to adjust to these catastrophic changes when Japanese troops occupied Manchuria and went on to invade China. It was the first important challenge to the League of Nations and called for effective action, but the League’s response was pathetically inadequate, a disappointment to those who had put their faith in collective security, and a taste of what lay ahead. Neither Russia nor America, the two powers best placed to intervene, were members of the League and Britain had no intention of taking military action. The League simply criticised the use of force and avoided branding Japan an aggressor.
Uncharacteristically, Leonard brought up the subject of the Sino-Japanese conflict at a dinner party given by Clive, and was shouted down by everyone there, including Virginia, who thought ‘war is the dullest of all things’.1 Thus began for Leonard the years of horror as he watched the League disintegrate and war approach.
* * *
The Hogarth Press was expanding, almost too rapidly for the Woolfs’ liking. It was no longer just a therapy for Virginia, an interesting diversion for Leonard, but a successful and prestigious publishing firm; the 1925 list contained thirty-four books. Over the years the Press published works by many distinguished writers and best sellers, and from 1924 the Press was responsible for the International Psycho-Analytical Library, which included Freud and prominent analysts.
As early as 1920 Leonard was complaining of the amount of work, that the Press ‘was beginning to outgrow its parents’.2 Leonard was entirely responsible for all the management and business side. Virginia set type, bound books, and parcelled them up, but her strength lay in judging the manuscripts which came in. She had no business sense, although plenty of ideas that she expressed when in high spirits, and which Leonard patiently listened to and ignored.
Virginia benefited from the Press. It prevented her ‘brooding and gives me something solid to fall bac
k on’.3 It relieved her of the anxiety of submitting her novels to another publisher, although by 1926 she felt confident enough to ‘doubt if Heinemann or Cape would much intimidate me’. But eventually she began to tire of reading manuscripts, and the Woolfs considered selling the Press, or using it solely for her and Leonard’s publications. In 1920 they appointed a part-time manager, Ralph Partridge, a bright young man who had just left Oxford. He admired the Woolfs, was ambitious to become a partner in a publishing firm of growing repute, and was intent on doing ‘hurricane’ business.
Leonard admitted he was never an easy person to work with.4 He was incapable of giving up the day-to-day running of the Press – he regarded it as his child – and delegating responsibility.
After a honeymoon period of a few weeks when he would instruct them – the managers – in their manifold obligations with fatherly patience and humour, [he] would become increasingly impatient, intolerant of little mistakes, and testy – indeed often hysterically angry – when things were not going quite to his liking; and when he was testy he could be extremely rude. The result was that each attempt to lift the burden on to a young man’s shoulders ended in more time wasted, mainly in altercation, and nerves frayed all round.5
Tensions were heightened by the working conditions – untidy, pokey rooms – and by Leonard’s parsimony. He ran the Press on a shoestring, and paid his authors little and his managers an almost insultingly low wage. Virginia, who possessed her father’s meanness and went along with Leonard’s penny-pinching ways, felt impelled on at least one occasion to apologise to Vita for what the Press offered.
Although she always sided with Leonard in disputes, she was often upset by them. On one occasion she walked into the end of ‘a terrific quarrel’ between Leonard and the manager Angus Davidson over whether or not he had arrived a few minutes late for work, which ended in his simultaneous dismissal and resignation, and everyone being upset. Virginia did not like bullying, which she looked on as a male characteristic, responsible for most of the world’s troubles. She could criticise Leonard to his face as ‘a tub-thumper, intolerant, arrogant’,6 when she was well, but when depressed she sank under it. She was troubled by the contrasting faces he presented in public and private. He was intolerant and bullied his subordinates, yet he wrote impassioned articles against aggression, and urged men and nations to resolve their differences through rational discussion and compromise.
* * *
Leonard’s decision to take over the publishing of the International Psycho-Analytical Library was partly prompted by his interest in Freud’s work. Leonard regarded Freud as a genius, although not infallible. He was sceptical of some of Freud’s hypotheses, but he was prepared to look at colleagues, and sometimes himself, through Freudian eyes:
I am sure that if one could look deep into the minds of those who are on the Left in politics (including myself), Liberals, revolutionaries, socialists, communists, pacifists, and humanitarians, one would find that their political beliefs and desires were connected with some very strange goings-on down among their Ids in their unconscious.7
However, Leonard did not consider analysis for himself (he would have been an impossible analysand, unable to give up intellectual control), although a number of friends took it up. James Strachey, Lytton’s younger brother, and his wife Alix, had been analysed by Freud:
Each day I spend an hour on the Prof’s sofa – it’s sometimes extremely exciting and sometimes extremely unpleasant. The Prof himself is most affable and, as an artistic performer, dazzling.8
Adrian Stephen gave up Law in 1920 and with his wife embarked on analytical training. However, not all Bloomsbury smiled on Freudian theory and methods. Roger Fry, backed by Clive Bell, was incensed by the idea of the artist as neurotic, and art being no more than his unconscious conflicts.
Leonard never considered psychoanalytic treatment for Virginia. Analysts were practising in London well before her breakdown, but treatment was still experimental and the results unpredictable and, it was said, liable to impair creative work. None of the specialists Leonard consulted for Virginia was au fait with psychoanalysis and both Savage and Craig were frankly hostile. Maurice Craig believed she lacked the mental stability to withstand the strain of having distressing ideas dredged up. Alix Strachey, a practising analyst and someone who knew Virginia well, agreed with that view and thought analysis would do more harm than good. Few psychiatrists today would contest that.
If Leonard had suggested psychoanalysis, he would probably have met strong opposition. The possibility of losing the urge to write would have horrified Virginia (it is, of course, an erroneous belief; an artist may be highly neurotic but the quality of one’s work does not depend on the neurosis, although that may colour the work). She would have objected to an analyst attempting to break into her privacy. ‘There is a virgin forest, tangled, pathless, in each [of us]’ she wrote in On Being Ill. ‘Here we go alone and like it better so. Always to be accompanied, always to be understood, would be intolerable.’9
Leonard was impressed by Freud’s discoveries regarding the unconscious and he more than half believed that if you punctured a pacifist, out would pour aggression. But he disagreed with Freud over how civilised man learnt to control his aggression and sexual instincts. Freud believed the destructive instincts were repressed into the unconscious in the early years through fear of punishment, and that in the process a sense of sin developed – ‘the unhappiness of mankind’. Leonard maintained that such repression was undesirable, for sooner or later it would give way and bring civilisation crashing to the ground with war and anarchy. Only when ‘love (in the widest sense) and reason are substituted for the sanctions of fear and sin’ will men learn truly to control their instincts and use them for creative and not destructive purposes.10 ‘To be a slave to [a sense of sin] is barbarism; to control it is civilisation.’11
Leonard learnt this, he claimed, through training his pets. Training based on fear rather than love resulted in less obedient and affectionate dogs. The same principle must apply to children. When all children can be brought up by enlightened parents and teachers whom they love, there will be no more war. Leonard maintained that he had never known a sense of sin. He had been brought up in a loving atmosphere, and developed into a rational civilised being whose impulses were always under his control. Not everyone would agree with this self-assessment. Leonard may have controlled his sexual instinct, but his aggression was liable to appear in all kinds of ‘uncivilised’ ways.
* * *
In December 1931 the Woolfs learnt that Lytton Strachey was seriously ill with ulcerative colitis; in fact he was dying of cancer of the stomach. In recent years they had seen less of Lytton but he had remained an important friend. Virginia still loved him deeply ‘after my Jew. He’s in all my past – my youth.’12 On Christmas Eve they heard he was dying, and they sat talking of ‘death and its stupidity’.13 Virginia asked how Leonard would feel if she died. She felt sure she would die first, yet she wanted to live another twenty years and ‘write another four novels’. She wondered about immortality, and questioned Leonard’s insistence that death was the end, with nothing beyond. She asked Maynard Keynes’s opinion. He was vague: ‘I suppose I think something may be continued’, but ‘death [should] be arranged for couples simultaneously.’14
Lytton died on 19 January. Leonard wept briefly and comforted Virginia. They were joined by Vanessa, and the two sisters ‘sat sobbing together … a sense of something spent, gone.’ Lytton had been ‘the first of the people one has known since one has grown up to die’. Virginia had adored, feared and admired him. They had talked of everything; ‘love and beauty, and prose and poetry’. She knew his complicated love life. He was not a ‘protector’ in the maternal sense, but he was part of Old Bloomsbury, the ‘family’ whose love she took for granted.15
Dora Carrington had fallen in love with Lytton as a young woman and devoted herself to him, looking after him, an inseparable daughter. Before Lytton died friends p
redicted she would commit suicide, and on 13 March she shot herself. The Woolfs had visited Carrington the day before her death. Virginia had held her while she wept and confessed she had nothing to live for, causing Virginia to think of her own dependence on Leonard. For a moment she too saw life as ‘hopeless, useless, when I woke in the night and thought of Lytton’s death.’16
Leonard took her to task. Carrington’s suicide was ‘histrionic’ and trivial compared to Lytton’s death. They talked again of suicide, ‘and the ghosts … change so oddly in my mind; like people who live and are changed by what one hears of them’. A week later Virginia was ‘glad to be alive and sorry for the dead; can’t think why Carrington killed herself.’18
* * *
Early in 1931 John Lehmann was appointed manager of the Press, and over the following year Leonard was increasingly critical of him. A major row developed and Virginia was bruised by the bickering. It was a relief when Lehmann left, but she was left disturbed by Leonard’s ‘desire to dominate’,19 to ride roughshod over people, and depressed by ‘the inane pointlessness of all this existence; the old treadmill feeling of going on and on, for no reason … terror at night of things generally wrong in the universe.’ She made herself think of Leonard’s ‘goodness, and firmness; and the immense responsibility that rests on him’, but she
saw all the violence and unreason crossing in the air: ourselves small; a tumult outside: something terrifying: unreason. Shall I make a book out of this? It would be a way of bringing order and speed again into my world.20
Male aggression and unreason angered and frightened her.
I’ve been nearer one of those climaxes of despair that I used to have than any time these six years – Lord knows why. Oh, how I suffer! and, what’s worse, for nothing, no reason that’s respectable … the incessant rubbing and rasping … the whole Press upset, and in process of death or birth, heaven knows which.21