The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

by Peter Dally

  The sight of such destruction set her mind whirling, and the next day she ‘suddenly conceived the idea of a new book’;40 ‘oh such an amusing book on English literature, the first chapter to be called Anon, the next, The Reader’.41 Never had she ‘been so fertile’. She was ‘very happy’ as the saying is; and excited by PH’ (Between the Acts), forging ahead with the novel.42 On 15 November she had ‘20 books sizzling in my head at the moment’.43

  The over-activity ceased and the excitement of war gave way to monotony and boredom. All her life she had needed stimulation to keep up her spirits; it was as essential as food and water. When it had been lacking in the past, Virginia had instinctively manufactured it through her friends, setting off emotional dramas by malicious gossip and ‘games playing’. Those who knew her well learnt to be cautious and, as Strachey observed, ‘one didn’t believe quite everything that came through Virginia’.44

  Now, however, there were few friends to hand and no gossip, for after September the Woolfs were largely cut off from London and most of their group. Petrol was scarce and it was difficult to travel far by car. Trains were unreliable and uncomfortable. Their resident cook left in September and for the first time the Woolfs were without a live-in domestic. Virginia had a local woman to clean and do some cooking and she initially welcomed the sense of freedom: ‘I like being alone in our little boat. I like provisioning and seeing all’s ship-shape and not having dependants.’45 She built up a romantic vision: ‘Fish forgotten. I must invent a dinner. But it’s all so heavenly free and easy – L and I alone.’46 But, unlike Leonard, Virginia could not thrive for long on solitude and domesticity; she needed the ‘peck and thrill’ of social life. To confine Virginia to Rodmell was like putting a skylark into a small cage and ending its song.

  Virginia’s mental health was always at risk, not only from tensions generated by suppressed emotions such as anger but by the absence of tension; lack of it resulted in boredom and led to depression. Her nervous system required an unusually high level of excitation to function efficiently and healthily, and the difference between optimum and minimum levels for health was narrow.

  Virginia struggled to come to terms with Rodmell life:

  Now we’re marooned, I ought to cram in a little more reading. Yet why? A happy, a very free and disengaged – a life that rings from one simple melody to another. Yes: why not enjoy this after all those years of the other? Yet I compare with Miss Perkins’ [a Hogarth Press clerk] day; public house life and greengrocers.

  She wistfully recalled the stimulation of London days. ‘Three afternoons someone coming. One night, dinner party. Saturday a walk. Thursday shopping. Tuesday going to tea with Nessa. One City walk. Telephone ringing. L to meetings’. Still, she thought, ‘If one lives in a village, one had better snatch its offerings.’47

  At the beginning of November, after some dithering, she agreed to stand for the Women’s Institute Committee and was elected Treasurer. She looked on it as an ‘infernal dull bore’,48 but she stuck to it and went on arranging lectures and entertainments right up to the end of her life, seeing the work as therapeutic, keeping her feet on the ground in the way that typesetting and bookbinding at the Press had done.

  Contact with old friends was more and more difficult. She kept in touch with Vita and Ethel, but met them only occasionally. It was a problem seeing Vanessa for petrol was so scarce that visits had to be rationed. The shortages of food and labour and the tedium of shopping started to bite:

  So much work to do … And so much shopping to do … the milk is so cut that we have to consider even the cat’s saucer … no sugar … no pastry unless I buy it ready made. The shops don’t fill till midday. Things are bought fast. In the afternoon they are often gone.49

  Monks House was damp and cold and untidy, and in disarray after December when their possessions from Mecklenburgh Square arrived in several vans. The Woolfs had intended to store most of the four tons of furniture and damp books, and the large printing press, in a nearby farmhouse but, in the event, much of it had to be squeezed into Monks House. Books were piled everywhere. There was scarcely room to stand let alone a space for dirt trays for Leonard’s pet kitten. Virginia was harassed ‘black and blue with moving’,51 bored and distracted:

  Oh the huddle and hideousness of untidiness – oh that Hitler had obliterated all our books, tables, carpets and pictures – oh that we were empty and bare and unpossessed…52 I see what a working woman’s life is. No time to think. A breeze ruffles the surface. No silence.53

  Leonard was still Virginia’s inviolable centre, intellectually the perfect companion, but he was not able to provide the kind of stimulation she required. He was a devoted husband, putting Virginia’s health above all else, and usually kept a close, even fussy, watch over her. In 1935 his attention had slipped because of the international crisis and he had failed to notice the early warning signs of serious depression until almost too late; but once alerted he had acted decisively and effectively.

  In the winter of 1940 Leonard’s attention again started to wander. He was gloomy about the outcome of the war and the future, and felt there was no longer any sense of purpose to his life, no vital work waiting, no urgent summons. Nonetheless he continued to fill his days with work, writing and lecturing, running the Press, involving himself in Rodmell life; he joined the fire service and was clerk to the parish council.

  He continued to keep an eye on Virginia, but she seemed to have taken on a new untroubled lease of life with the war. Leonard thought she was ‘happier and more serene than was usual with her’.54 Never sociable, he welcomed their isolation, almost deliberately shutting his eyes to her social appetite, looking on it as beneficial to Virginia’s health. Not only did he ignore signs of her growing claustrophobia with village life but positively began to discourage Virginia’s attempts to break out. An invitation from Ethel Smyth to spend a few days with her at Woking threw Leonard into such a state that Virginia was taken aback, ‘for some occult reason, [Leonard] cries No No No’.55 She was irritated but hesitated to challenge Leonard. ‘I think it’s a bad thing that we’re so inseparable’, she told Ethel, ‘but how in this world of separation, does one break it?’56

  Leonard’s reluctance to let Virginia out of his sight amounted almost to separation anxiety, and reflected his depressed state, the presence of the unhappy child glimpsed by Virginia in the past. Insecure, he now needed Virginia in the same childlike way she had clung to him in the early years of their marriage. Subconsciously Virginia recognised this, but she was troubled. She still required a strong reliable husband.

  When friends invited her to lunch, along with Clive, she jumped at the opportunity; ‘they might be stimulating, and I’m susceptible and they might give me champagne, mentally as well’. Leonard at once objected; it would be timewasting to go; they were uninteresting people. Virginia did not go. She was trapped. ‘No audience. No private stimulus’.57

  The first sign that her depression was developing to a dangerous level came at the end of November when, after hearing Leonard lecture, Virginia made a strangely paranoid entry in her diary:

  I was thinking about Vampires. Leeches. Anyone with 500 a year and education is at once sucked by the leeches. Put me and L into Rodmell pool and we are sucked – sucked – sucked … Last night L’s lecture attracted suckers … Leech Octavia asks to come.58

  Again, on 13 December Kingsley Martin stayed the night and ‘devours sugar and butter … Why are we hooked to that large, rather pretentious, livid bellied shark? And must I spend my last years feeding his double row of teeth?… at meals he scrapes and sops’.59 It was understandable to resent sparse rations being gobbled up, but on this occasion Virginia’s paranoia reflected a deeper mental disturbance.

  Bouts of trembling started to affect her right hand, and she wondered if she was ‘becoming palsied’.60 Reading her parents’ letters and father’s memoirs for her own memoir was relaxing:

  how simple, how clear, how untroubled … He loved he
r … was so candid and reasonable and transparent … such a fastidious delicate mind … How serene and gay even their life reads to me: no mud, no whirlpools. And so human – with the children and the little hum and song of the nursery.61

  Virginia looking back on her past through the child’s eyes felt comforted; when she looked ahead she saw only darkness.

  She was losing weight; eating less but paradoxically thinking about food, savouring each mouthful, making up imaginary meals like a modern-day anorexic, signalling regression. She ended the year quoting Matthew Arnold to herself:

  The foot less prompt

  to meet the morning dew,

  The heart less bounding

  at emotion new,

  And hope, once crushed,

  less quick to spring again.

  Civilisation seemed to be ending. She and Leonard went to London in mid-January. Virginia loved the City, ‘the passion of my heart’ and was intensely upset by the damage. She ‘wandered in the desolate ruins of my old squares: gashed, dismantled; the old red bricks all white powder … all that completeness ravished and demolished’. On the spur of the moment she went into Buszards ‘to eat gluttonously. Turkey and pancakes. How rich, how solid.’62 ‘I have so seldom gloried in food, all alone.’63 It was out of keeping.

  In February she watched two women ‘consuming rich cakes … They ate and ate … Something scented, shoddy, parasitic about them … Where does the money come from to feed these fat white slugs?’64 Food became an obsession. ‘I grudge giving away a spice bun.’ A week later she was observing

  the shell-encrusted old women, rouged, decked, cadaverous at the teashop … I mark Henry James’s sentence: Observe perpetually. Observe the outcome of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency.65

  Poverty and death began to preoccupy her. Her diary for 9 January records:

  A blank. All frost. Still frost. Burning white. Burning blue. The elms red. I did not mean to describe, once more, the Downs in snow; but it came. And I can’t help even now turning to look at Asheham Down, red, purple; dove blue grey, with the cross so melodramatically against it. What is the phrase I always remember – or forget? ‘Look your last on all things lovely.’66

  Yesterday Mrs Deadman was buried upside down. A mishap. ‘Such a heavy woman,’ as Louie [their cleaner] put it, feasting spontaneously upon the grave. Today she buries the Aunt whose husband saw the vision at Seaford. Their house was bombed by the bomb we heard early one morning last week. And L is lecturing and arranging the room. Are these the things that are interesting? That recall; that say Stop, you are so fair? Well, all life is so fair, at my age. I mean, without much more of it, I suppose, to follow. And t’other side of the hill, there’ll be no rosy blue red snow.

  Shaking off the spectre of death, she added, ‘I am economising. I am to spend nothing.’67

  The New Year cyclothymic depression began to bite towards the end of January and joined forces with the reactive depression that had been building up all winter. Virginia, in a ‘trough of despair’, told Leonard, ‘I think we live without a future … With our noses pressed to a closed door.’68 It was a call for help, warning of trouble brewing, but Leonard believed her gloom to be merely Virginia’s usual reaction to revising and finishing her novel Between the Acts. The mood lightened after twelve days, but the underlying mental disturbance, which Virginia kept hidden from Leonard, continued inexorably.

  Leonard was kept in the dark, and deceived by the absence of the headache which usually heralded her depression although, had he but realised, its very absence was a pointer to the severity of the depression. A painful headache nearly always ushered in Virginia’s depressions and persisted until she recovered. But when depression deepened to a more dangerous level, thus threatening insanity, headache gave way to a numb sensation, as though the brain were frozen. Finally hallucinations, the ‘visionary’ phase of madness, began.69 In the run-up to the breakdowns of 1904 and 1913 headache had been present only in the very early stages and was absent in the weeks immediately preceding insanity. By contrast it was a prominent symptom during most of the 1936 illness.

  Virginia was in control of herself on 11 February when she and Leonard travelled to Cambridge to inspect the Press’s new home in Letchworth and visit old friends. Leonard was satisfied by her apparent enjoyment, but she told Ethel Smyth,

  Ever since we came back from Cambridge – 30 hours in train journeys; £6 on hotel bills; all for Leonard to spend 2 hours in Letchworth – I’ve been in a fret.70

  Virginia’s reluctance to eat now became more pronounced and Leonard at last became concerned. He tried to cajole and persuade but she ‘was very hard to deal with. She lost weight terribly.’71 Leonard knew the serious consequences of Virginia’s losing weight, and he eventually sought advice from Dr Octavia Wilberforce, whom both Woolfs liked.

  Octavia lived in Brighton where she practised as a doctor, and lived with the actress and novelist Elizabeth Robins. She was a sensible, attractive, outdoor type, rather dogmatic and prudish, and she detested Freud for ‘allowing hugely for sex’. Virginia and she had met in 1937 and discovered they were related through the marriage of Virginia’s great-grandfather to William Wilberforce’s sister, but not until the end of 1940, when Elizabeth Robins left for America, did they become more closely acquainted.

  Octavia had tea at Monks House and fell under Virginia’s spell. She was worried by her ‘extreme thinness’ and ‘hands worse than icicles’, and arranged to send regular supplies of cream and milk (she owned a herd of Jersey cows) ‘in exchange for apples and a copy of Virginia’s next book’.72 Virginia was moved by the ‘generosity … trouble and the really miraculous gift’, but, she confessed, the novel was a ‘completely worthless book. I’ve lost all power over words – can’t do a thing with them’.73 Octavia, as she admitted, was ‘very unobservant’, and failed to notice the underlying depression, attributing Virginia’s words to ‘exaggeration’. She diagnosed ‘a thoroughly frail creature’.74

  By the New Year Octavia had become a light in the gathering gloom, a possible maternal figure capable of stirring Virginia’s fantasies: ‘I’ve a new love, a doctor, a Wilberforce, a cousin … does that make you twitch?!’ she told Vita on 19 January.75 She sought to see more of Octavia and suggested doing a living portrait. ‘I think you’re very paintable, as the painters say. Now I wonder why? Something that composes well – perhaps reticence and power combined.’76

  She began to gather details of Octavia’s life but, more often than not, Virginia did the talking, mostly about her own family life. By mid-March she was revealing how desperate she felt, ‘depressed to the lowest depths’. Octavia still did not recognise the danger signals. She adopted a ‘pull yourself together and stop brooding’ approach, which did more harm than good. Finally, she upset Virginia very much by admonishing her for spending far too much time thinking about her family; it was ‘all nonsense, blood thicker than water – balderdash … better to harrow a field or play a game.’77 Virginia turned away.

  Despite trembling hands and ‘mornings of torture’, Virginia completed Between the Acts on 26 February and gave it to Leonard to read. She felt better as the day wore on and by evening managed to read or write a little, but it was increasingly difficult to concentrate. She tried working on simple manual tasks like scrubbing floors and beating carpets, but by March even these activities were becoming too much for her.

  On 14 March she lunched at Westminster with Leonard and John Lehmann. When Lehmann congratulated her on the completion of her new novel she became intensely agitated and told him it was no good at all, and obviously couldn’t be published.78 Leonard intervened to say how good he thought the book, whereupon Virginia rounded on him, saying he was wrong. For Virginia to throw out Leonard’s praise, normally so vital to her peace of mind, was an ominous sign, on a par with her refusal to eat with him. Leonard was no longer the good parental figure.

  By now Virginia was ‘as thin as a razor’ and had paranoid delusions
; her thoughts were racing outside her control, and hallucinatory voices were probably already tormenting and pushing her towards suicide. Even when she came back from a walk ‘soaking wet, looking ill and shaken’, saying ‘she had slipped and fallen into one of the dykes’, Leonard ‘did not definitely suspect anything’.79 Not until 26 March could he believe Virginia was ‘on the verge of danger’. Then he tried vainly to persuade her to go to bed for a ‘rest cure for at least a week’.80

  The next day, desperately anxious, he insisted on driving Virginia to see Octavia at Brighton. She was angry and hostile to the doctor, reiterating how unnecessary it was to have come. ‘All you have to do is to reassure Leonard,’ she kept repeating, but eventually she agreed to an examination on condition Octavia promised not to prescribe a rest cure.81

  Octavia was not a psychiatrist and was out of her depth. Her friendly greeting, ‘If you’ll collaborate, I know I can help you,’ only served to increase Virginia’s resistance, for collaboration was impossible. No real contact between the women occurred. Octavia was too polite to ask about suicide. Had she done so she might have understood the danger. Many suicide patients freely confess their intention to a doctor who asks, often with some relief, and will even promise to postpone suicide until after their next meeting. Such seemingly bizarre behaviour stems from what persists of the wish to live, and guilt for causing pain to relatives. A promise in such circumstances is usually kept and the doctor may find he has gained his patient’s trust and co-operation. He must then act decisively.

  Virginia had been contemplating suicide for at least ten days before she drowned herself and had probably already made one abortive attempt. It was too late for Leonard alone to save her. The only way disaster could have been prevented at that stage was for Dr Wilberforce, backed by Leonard, to have insisted on continuous surveillance by trained nurses, if necessary under certification. Neither would have accepted so drastic a move. Virginia and Leonard returned home.