by Peter Dally
As 1937 ended Leonard was again crippled by back pains. Kidney disease was suggested and he was put on a strict diet. There was talk of an operation on the prostate, and Virginia was on tenterhooks while doctors argued amongst themselves and ‘threatened nursing homes, and all the horrors’.46 She would rather her own death than Leonard’s. Her relief in mid-January when all tests proved normal was immense.
The enforced rest improved Leonard, but his doctor’s continuing suspicion of ‘the prostate gland’ – that ‘perennial horror’ – and Leonard’s obsession about dying, created a hypochondriacal atmosphere.47 When a rash developed on his back in November he immediately decided it must come from the prostate, and all the old tests were repeated. As the international situation worsened, his eczema returned, and he was often ‘lacerated with his rash’.48 His gloom was intense. When Beatrice Webb met Leonard at the outbreak of war he ‘looked terribly ill’ and his tremor was very noticeable.49 Virginia enjoyed fussing over Leonard, being the ‘good wife’, acting the ‘mother to a hurt and miserable little boy’.50 It was a relief to worry about his indigestion and low weight instead of herself, and she made him obey doctor’s orders, much as Leonard did when she was ill.
Virginia remained well after 1936, disturbed only by brief cyclothymic depressions in the New Year, until 1941. In October she had a sudden impulse to spend a weekend in Paris, but Leonard was too busy and said he would miss her if she went alone:
then I was overcome with happiness. Then we walked round the square lovemaking – after 25 years can’t bear to be separate … it is an enormous pleasure, being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete.51
In July 1937 Virginia’s nephew Julian Bell was killed while driving an ambulance in the Spanish Civil War. Vanessa was overcome with grief. She had been particularly close to her eldest son, so much so that Virginia had remarked her nephew seemed more his mother’s lover than a son.
Vanessa lay for weeks in bed, unable to face the loss. Virginia immediately went to her aid and for the rest of the summer gave herself up to caring for her sister, visiting her at Charleston almost every day. Only Virginia was able to comfort Vanessa and understand and break through her grief, and Vanessa came to depend on her:
I remember all those days after I heard about Julian lying in an unreal state and hearing her voice going on and on keeping life going as it seemed when otherwise it would have stopped, and late every day she came to see me here [at Charleston], the only point in the day one could want to come.52
The letters Virginia sent Vanessa at this time are like the love letters of old:
If you notice a dancing light on the water, that’s me. The light kisses your nose, then your eyes, and you can’t rub it off; my darling honey, how I adore you.53
The strain of caring for Vanessa did not upset Virginia’s balance – by taking attention off herself it may even have been beneficial – but made her irritable with Leonard and ‘rather quarrelsome’. Perhaps Leonard, too, was a little put out by all the attention Virginia gave her sister, and she worried; ‘Have I the right to leave Leonard alone and sit with Nessa?’54
Vanessa slowly returned to life. She was immensely grateful to Virginia for giving so much of herself and making no demands, so unlike her behaviour in the past. On the anniversary of Julian’s birthday, Virginia wrote, ‘You know I’d do anything I could to help you, and it’s so awful not to be able to; except to adore you as I do.’55 Vanessa replied, ‘I can’t show it and I feel so stupid and such a wet blanket often but I couldn’t get on at all if it weren’t for you.’56
As soon as Virginia finished The Years she began on Three Guineas. It absorbed her, ‘pressed and spurted out of me … like a “physical volcano”’.57 All her feelings against male aggression and war went into the work, which was enlivened by satire and comical pictures of bemedalled men in peacock-like military uniforms. Men are natural warmongers, she declared; there is for them ‘some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting which we [women] have never felt or enjoyed’.58 Only when women obtained power and responsibility – provided they were not corrupted into becoming like men – could society hope to change and war be avoided.
Julian’s death added fire to her pen. Her nephew had had a ‘passion for the art [of war]; and a longing – instinctive and irrational – to fight.’59 Nothing would stop him. He was heartless in going, knowing how it must torture Vanessa, the waste of his death. ‘What made him do it? I suppose it’s a fever in the blood.’60
The writing brought tranquillity. Virginia felt ‘cool and quiet after the expulsion’ of so much emotion.61 She finished the book and showed the manuscript to Leonard, untroubled by their different outlook. Leonard was detached; ‘gravely approves 3G’ and judged it ‘an extremely clear analysis’.62 Inwardly he was distinctly lukewarm and he probably agreed with Maynard Keynes, who thought Three Guineas ‘a silly argument and not very well written’.63 Virginia had hoped for more praise but she was not dismayed:
I wanted how violently – how persistently, pressingly compulsorily I can’t say – to write this book; and have a quiet composed feeling; as if I had said my say: take it or leave it.’64
Critics and friends’ reactions to Three Guineas were mixed. Q. D. Leavis in the Scrutiny condemned it, to Virginia’s amusement:
this book is not merely silly and ill-informed, though it is that too, it contains some dangerous assumptions, some preposterous claims and some nasty attitudes … It seems to me the art of living as conceived by a social parasite.65
She met Ethel Smyth’s accusation of lack of patriotism by,
Of course I’m ‘patriotic’: that is, English, the language, farms, dogs, people: only we must enlarge the imaginative, and take stock of the emotion.66
Vita disagreed with half of it. Vanessa was ambivalent. She looked on war as ‘madness. It’s destruction and not creation’,67 and yet Julian’s urge to fight had to be respected. If Virginia disagreed, she had the sense to keep quiet, and their newly restored intimacy continued.
The death of Leonard’s mother, at 87, in July 1939 affected him deeply. His depression was predictable, given his lifelong ambivalence. He had failed to invite her to his wedding, hurting her deeply, caricatured her as a silly woman in The Wise Virgins and, unlike his siblings, failed to acknowledge the sacrifices she had made for her young family. Yet he was always concerned for her well-being, her finances and physical needs, and visited and entertained her regularly.
Marie Woolf blamed Virginia for Leonard’s boorish behaviour, believing that Virginia had taken her son away from his family. Virginia had indeed been hostile in the beginning, and encouraged Leonard’s childish behaviour, yet in time she came to respect the old lady’s qualities, and at the end they were on ‘friendly, laughing terms’.68
Leonard’s gloom persisted. He was ‘peculiarly primordially sensitive’ to his mother’s death,69 and it had occurred at a particularly difficult time, when the world was reverting to barbarism. The months that followed were ‘the most terrible months of my life’.70
Chapter Fifteen
War, Depression and Suicide
The war began on 3 September and during the next eighteen months Viginia’s state of mind changed three times. Between September 1939 and April 1940, although outwardly relaxed, there was tension below the surface and her customary depression was prolonged from February into early April. The succeeding summer high was extended by excitement of the Battle of Britain into the October/November lift. Then came the final stage of increasing circumstantial depression, which, adding to the January/February cyclothymia, led to her death.
The Woolfs had moved house shortly before war was declared, but their flat in Mecklenburgh Square was unprepared and they were living at Rodmell, commuting to London every fortnight for a few days. Virginia was relaxed; ‘If we win – then what?’ ‘The unreality of force’ muffled everthing.1 She carried coals for newly-arrived evacuees, made black-out curtains, and looked after clerks fr
om the Hogarth Press temporarily staying at Monks House. ‘It’s hard work talking to clerks. That’s been the only work I’ve done since last week. But you see my little tap dries up’, she told Ethel Smyth.2
Virginia’s tap soon opened. ‘Those first days of complete nullity’ gave way to ‘a pressure of ideas and work’.3 She took up journalism and wrote monthly articles for the New Statesman because ‘I shall have to work to make money.’4 Her concern was not unrealistic, and very different from the depressive delusion of poverty that was to develop in 1941. At the same time she was giving a final polish to the Roger Fry biography, continuing with her memoirs which she had begun in April, moving ahead with Between the Acts.
She read a variey of books, and in December began on Freud. She had digested Moses and Monotheism in July and now started Civilisation and its Discontents and The Future of an Illusion, ‘to enlarge the circumference, to give my brain a wider scope’.5 There were perhaps other reasons; continuing concern over war and aggression; remembrance (brought up by memoirs) of her father’s rages and the anger they evoked in her; and, by extension, Leonard’s aggressive behaviour and her own anger.
She read compulsively at first, ‘gulping up Freud’. What he wrote she found interesting but also ‘upsetting: reducing one to whirlpool: and I daresay truly. If we’re all instinct, the unconscious, what’s all this about civilisation, the whole man, freedom, etc?’ She liked Freud’s ‘savagery against God. The falseness of loving one’s neighbours. The conscience as censor. Hate.’6
Initially, Virginia settled into the new style of life. She could write without interruption, and she told Vita in December, ‘I don’t think I shall ever live in London again.’7 Social life was adequate. Friends came to stay, and their days in London were ‘hectic’.
That winter was one of the coldest on record; ‘Never was there such a medieval winter.’ They were sometimes snowbound. Pipes froze. The electricity broke down and they cooked on the fire, ‘remained unwashed, slept in stockings and mufflers’.8 Virginia was irritable and gloomy by mid-January; writing less and worrying about a promised lecture – ‘for 5 days I could do nothing but improvise a WEA lecture’9 – and fearing the Roger Fry book was ‘not a book, only a piece of cabinet making, and only of interest to R’s friends.’10 Visits to London
in nips [became] cramped and creased. Odd how often I think with what is love I suppose of the City: of the walk to the Tower: that is my England; I mean, if a bomb destroyed one of those little alleys with the brass bound curtains and the river smell and the old woman reading I should feel – well, what the patriots feel.11
The late winter dip gave rise to ‘a queer sense of suspense, being led up to the spring of 1940’,12 and at the end of February ‘Virginia retired to bed with headache, insomnia and a fluctuating temperature. ‘The Dr now calls it recurring influenza with a touch of bronchitis’, she informed Ethel Smth.13 ‘Head a white vapour: legs bent candles. All hope abandoned’.14 The depression was not severe; she continued to read, and after midday she could write letters but her temperature continued to oscillate, each ‘relapse’ sending her back to sleep in Leonard’s room, until early April.
She had finished Roger Fry and given the manuscript to Leonard before she took to her bed. His reaction, ‘a very severe lecture’, was unexpected; ‘It’s merely analysis, not history. Austere repression. In fact dull to the outsider. All those dead quotations’. Virginia felt she was ‘being pecked by a very hard strong beak’.15 The biography is in fact dull and lifeless, but Virginia was still depressed and, knowing the importance she put on his approval, it was a surprising attack.
Virginia was momentarily convinced the book was a failure but suddenly she felt sure that Leonard was ‘on the wrong tack and persisting for some deep reason – dissympathy with R? Lack of interest in personality? Lord knows’.16 The unexpected shock had a therapeutic effect and swept depression away. She saw Leonard in a fresh light; not the authoritarian paternal figure whose approval was so vital, but a hurt and miserable little boy wanting to be comforted. She could now see him, as she could her father, from two angles: ‘As a child condemning; as a woman of 58 understanding – I should say tolerating’.17
All that summer of 1940 Virginia was in good heart, sometimes teetering on the edge of hypomania, excited by the unfolding aerial drama overhead. The German blitz had begun 10 May and by mid-June French resistance was over. Leonard had an ‘incessant feeling of unreality and impending disaster’, of living in a ‘curious atmosphere of quiet fatalism, of waiting for the inevitable’.18 Virginia’s diary gives a sense of his despair; invasion and defeat almost inevitable, with suicide or death in resisting. When the battle in France opened he told Virginia he had enough ‘petrol in the garage for suicide should Hitler win’.19 Two days later he proposed joining the Home Guard to fight expected enemy parachutists.
Virginia was concerned with the ‘vast formless shapes’ of events yet her emotions were not deeply engaged.20 For short spells the war could obsess her, ‘then the feeling faculty gives out’.21 She rejected Leonard’s plan of suicide:
I don’t want the garage to see the end of me. I’ve a wish for 10 years more, and to write my book which as usual darts into my brain.
She pondered on:
why am I optimistic? or rather not either way? because it’s all bombast, this war. One old lady pinning on her cap has more reality. So if one dies, it’ll be a commonsense, dull end.22
Many friends were as pessimistic as Leonard and talked openly of suicide. Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman, with whom Leonard worked closely and for whom he sometimes deputised, diffused ‘his soft charcoal gloom … French … beaten; invasion here; 5th Column active; a German pro-consul; English Government in Canada; we in concentration camps, or taking sleeping draughts.’23
Virginia ridiculed Leonard’s proposal to join the Home Guard. The sight of Leonard in uniform and carrying a gun was ‘to me slightly ridiculous’.24 Clive might ‘sit up at night watching for Germans in a helmet’, but not Leonard.25 An idea came: ‘the army is the body: I am the brain. Thinking’s my fighting.’26 She wanted England to survive, but she remained a pacifist and hated ‘the feelings war breeds: patriotism; communal etc. all sentimental and emotional parodies of our real feelings’. She was indignant when Leonard gave away all their aluminium saucepans ‘to make aeroplanes’.27
Rodmell was on the flight path to London of the German air force, and Virginia watched dogfights overhead and saw planes shot down. Monks House was rocked by near misses, and in mid-August the roar of planes came so close that she and Leonard lay flat waiting for the blast, convinced ‘we shall be broken together’.28 Next day they had ‘the closest shave so far with five bombers, hedge-hopping on their way to London, almost crashing into the dining room.’29
The fear was stimulating and she felt, for the first time, ‘Now we are in the war. England is being attacked … The feeling of pressure, danger, horror.’30 When twelve Spitfires ‘went over, out to sea, to fight, last evening, I had I think an individual, not communal BBC dictated feeling. I almost instinctively wished them luck.’31 Her fantasies were fired and she wrote to Sibyl Colefax: ‘If you hear that Virginia had disarmed 6 German pilots you won’t be in the least surprised, will you?’32 Her sense of history was stirred when Churchill broadcast a warning of imminent invasion, comparing the danger ‘with the days when the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel and Drake was finishing his game of bowls’, much as she and Leonard were doing on their bowling green.33
The Woolfs regularly played bowls and threw their anxieties into the game. Leonard had never liked losing but Virginia’s irritation when defeated only developed that summer. Gloomy and fidgety after one loss she told herself it was because ‘I connect it with Hitler’.34 After losing a game she vowed to play no more, but next day was always eager to resume the contest.
Virginia had often exhausted herself in the past during the summer highs, and had been forced to rest i
n August and September. In 1940 she remained lively, and only in a letter to Vita at the end of August is there any hint of mental disturbance: ‘Dearest’, she wrote, ‘let me have a line – let us meet next week. But one can scarcely bear it. Only we must. You have given me such happiness.’35 The letter has a depressed, farewell quality, but it was written after Vita had telephoned to cancel a visit because of a raid and Virginia feared she might be killed any moment. Next day she was apparently cheerful and gave an amusing account of the Dreadnought Hoax to the Memoir Club, but the diary entries have a depressive colouring: ‘So lovely an evening that the flat and the Downs looked as if seen for the last time.’36 ‘All writers are unhappy. The picture of the world in books is too dark. The wordless are the happy: women in cottage gardens.’37 On and off at first, then increasingly as winter approached, one glimpses the gathering depression.
* * *
In September the German tactics changed and daylight battles over Rodmell gave way to the nightly drone of bombers en route to attack London. On 10 September a time bomb fell on Mecklenburgh Square that exploded three days later and severely damaged the flat, and the Hogarth Press in the basement. The destruction was completed the following month by a landmine falling at the back of the house.
The Woolfs travelled up to inspect the damage. Surveying the mess, Virginia, as much excited as downcast, was exhilarated
at losing possessions – save at times I want my books and chairs and carpets and bed – how I worked to buy them … But to be free of Mecklenburgh would now be a relief; it’s odd – the relief of losing possessions. I should like to start life, in peace, almost bare – free to go anywhere.38
What most ‘raked’ her heart was ‘the grimy old woman at the lodging house at the back, all dirty after the raid, and preparing to sit out another’; and to see ‘the passion of my life, that is the City of London – to see London all blasted … the alleys and little courts, between Chancery Lane and the City. I walked to the Tower … by way of caressing my love of all that.’39