by Peter Dally
At some point during what must have been a dreadful night of agitation, Virginia came to a firm decision to kill herself. Such a decision always resolves conflict and brings peace of mind. She calmly wrote farewell letters to Leonard and Vanessa, which she left on her writing block. In both letters her deep love for Leonard shines through the depression. To Vanessa, she wrote:
I feel that I have gone too far this time to come back again. I am certain now that I am going mad again. It is just as it was the first time, I am always hearing voices, and I know I shan’t get over it now.
All I want to say is that Leonard has been so astonishingly good, every day, always; I can’t imagine that anyone could have done more for me than he has. We have been perfectly happy until the last few weeks, when this horror began. Will you assure him of this? I feel he has so much to do that he will go on, better without me, and you will help him.82
To Leonard she wrote:
I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that. But I know that I shall never get over this; and I am wasting your life. Nothing anyone says can persuade me. You can work, and you will be much better without me. You see I can’t write this even, which shows I am right. All I wish to say is that until this disease came on me we were perfectly happy. It was all due to you. No one could have been so good from the very first day till now. Everyone knows that.83
Virginia was not entirely sane at this time; much of her thinking was delusional and her feelings were no longer comprehensible. But she could still appear outwardly ‘normal’. Leonard found her to be calm and collected on the morning of 28 March before she went out, and anyone meeting Virginia on her way to the river bank would have seen nothing out of the ordinary. Reaching the river, she filled her pockets with stones, left her walking stick on the ground, and walked into the icy waters.
When she failed to return for lunch, Leonard ran across the fields to the river and found her stick lying upon the bank. After searching fruitlessly he rang the police. The body was found three weeks later by children, close to where she had drowned.
She was cremated in Brighton on 21 April and Leonard buried her ashes at the foot of one of the two great intertwining elms at Rodmell which the Woolfs called Leonard and Virginia.
Leonard’s pain was too great to express. Outwardly he was self-controlled and calm, and insisted on being left alone. Quentin Bell, who saw him some days later, was horrified at his despair, ‘stoic though he was’.84 Only twice did he break down momentarily with Octavia Wilberforce while discussing Virginia’s illness, and in front of Vanessa after returning from the cremation.
Leonard went on living at Rodmell, going to London to committee meetings, desperately filling his days with work to blot out the memory of his inability to save Virginia. Vanessa offered comfort but felt ‘very useless’.85 Vita predicted his suicide.
In April 1942, seeking change and in order to work more intensively, he moved back into London, living in three patched-up rooms in the bombed Mecklenburgh Square house. By October 1943 he could no longer bear the gloom and discomfort and took a lease on 24 Victoria Square. There he became friendly with his neighbour, Trekkie Parsons, whom he and Virginia had known and liked before the war. The friendship developed and, to quote Quentin Bell, Trekkie ‘saved [him] from the depths of despair’.86 She became his ‘Dearest Tiger’, and by 1944 had transformed his life from one of misery into happiness. She was much younger, a painter, married to the publisher Ian Parsons, who in turn became a close friend of Leonard. When John Lehmann ended his partnership with Leonard at the Hogarth Press in 1945, Parsons and his co-directors at Chatto & Windus, at Leonard’s instigation, took Lehmann’s place. It was an ideal arrangement for everyone.
Leonard led a busy life for the next twenty-five years, working, gardening, travelling abroad with Trekkie, his idealism and vitality undiminished until in April 1969 he suffered a stroke. He died on 14 August, aged 88.
Appendix
Mania, Madness and Creativity
Mental normality depends on a balance between the workings of our internal mental world and the real outside world; our fantastic ideas are constantly being modified and discarded in the light of reality. Madness develops when an individual becomes cut off from reality, isolated within himself, and loses touch with everyday feedback from the outside world. Ideas that to other people are absurd or dangerous, now come to seem ‘true’. Self-control – a reflection of society’s standards – disappears, and the madman, impulsive and unreasonable, lives and acts out his fantasies.
Virginia’s episodes of manic depression were all preceded by weeks of increasing depression and fleeting signs of mania. Delusions and hallucinations appeared and warped her judgement. For a time she could conceal this but eventually she became obviously insane. During madness birds spoke to her in Greek, her dead mother materialised and harangued her, voices called her to ‘do wild things’. She refused nourishment. Trusted companions like her husband Leonard and her sister Vanessa became enemies and were abused and assaulted; it seemed to her sister that Virginia had ‘changed into a most unpleasant character’. A manic depressive always recovers from an attack, although it may last two or more years. As Virginia returned to sanity, delusions faded and she became her old self.
The onset of Virginia’s depressions was invariably heralded by three symptoms: headache at the back of the head and neck, which was extremely painful, ‘like enraged rats gnawing the nape of my neck’,1 and sometimes accompanied by ‘flashes of light raying round my eyes’;2 sleeplessness; and racing thoughts; ‘racing despair and exaltation – that long scale of unhappiness’.3 Provided she went to bed, rested, stopped work and cancelled all engagements depression lasted only a few weeks; but if she attempted to keep going, symptoms rapidly worsened. The pain of headache then gave way to ‘numbness’4 and then, as breakdown neared, to visions and voices.
Depression is a universal reaction to loss and major reverses, but cyclothymic depression appears more often than not for no apparently discernible or justifiable reason. Its source is biological. A distressing event or physical illness that precedes or accompanies the cyclothymic depression is often blamed. It is not the cause although it may be responsible for potentiating the depression and may prolong and worsen the mental state to a dangerous degree.
Stressful and over-exciting occasions, in the absence of cyclothymic depression, could always upset and exhaust Virginia and send her to bed for several days. These moods were never serious and Virginia welcomed them at times: they had ‘their advantages – one visits such remote strange places lying in bed’.5 When she ran into difficulties writing The Waves she longed for a week in bed; ‘My mind works in idleness. To do nothing in a profitable way’.6
Most people have no conception of the agony of pathological depression. The poet William Cowper was afflicted by ‘such a dejection of spirits – day and night I was upon the rack, lying down in horrors and rising in despair’, that he was convinced that ‘none but they who have felt the same can have the least conception of it’.7 Virginia Woolf, although she valued the experience of madness in providing self-knowledge and a source of creativity, was terrified by it, ‘tremblingly afraid of my own insanity’ and ‘almost crippled when I came back to the world, unable to move a foot in terror’.8
Symptoms of depression can affect almost any system in the body, which frequently makes for confusion in diagnosis. The mood is one of gloom and pessimism, and anxiety is never far off. ‘Such anguishes and despairs’, Virginia experienced, ‘never was anyone so tossed up and down by the body as I am’.9 She was sure she was a failure, and she could see ‘no pleasure in life whatsoever’.10 Her mind felt ‘a blank’ and she would never again have the power of writing.11 In a bad depression she would seize on some subject to worry about but no sooner was it dealt with by Leonard than a new one would take its place.
The loss of energy in cases of depression, both physica
l and mental, is striking. Virginia found it an effort to think logically; thoughts came slowly and concentration was difficult, reading and writing came to a halt. She felt clumsy and her movements uncoordinated. Her hand was stiff and she ‘had the same stiffness in manipulating sentences’.12 It was then that Virginia felt a perverse pleasure in bed, in being alone, her mind effortlessly filling with words and sentences and ideas for books. It was thus, while lying in bed recovering from the depression of 1929, that she conceived A Room of One’s Own.
Insomnia is a characteristic of most depressions, although one small group of depressives (although not cyclothymes) sleep longer than usual. Normally when Virginia was stable she ‘slept splendidly’, but when depressed she would waken abruptly after three hours. Many depressives experience the horror of waking every morning between 2 and 3 a.m., sweating with fear. Scott Fitzgerald maintained that ‘In a real dark night of the soul, it is always 3 o’clock in the morning.’13 Cowper ‘slept [his] usual 3 hours well
and then awakened with ten times a stronger sense of my alienation from God than ever. Satan plied me close with horrible visions and more horrible voices. A numbness seized upon the extremities of my body and life seemed to retreat before it. My hands and feet became cold and stiff; a cold sweat stood upon my forehead.14
Virginia knew the same terror. ‘All my spectres come out on a sleepless night.’ She recorded an instance:
Woke up perhaps at 3. Oh it’s beginning it’s coming – the horror – physically like a painful wave swelling about the heart – tossing me up. I’m unhappy unhappy! Down – God I wish I were dead. Pause. But why am I feeling this? Let me watch the wave rise. I watch. Vanessa. Children. Failure. Yes, I detect that. Failure. Failure. (The wave rises.) Oh they laughed at my taste in green paint! Wave crashes. I wish I were dead! I’ve only a few more years to live I hope. I can’t face this horror any more – (this is the wave spreading out over me).
Sometimes she would doze off only to reawaken ‘with a start. The wave again! The irrational pain; the sense of failure, generally some specific incident, as for example my taste in green paint or buying a new dress’.15 When the new day arrived she was exhausted.
Depression brings about a progressive change of character. The philanthropist becomes a misanthrope, generosity turns into parsimony, calmness gives way to furious reaction, humour goes out the window. The previously confident gregarious individual has nothing to say, no ideas, no small talk, his mind emptied. When depressed, Virginia wanted to hide. ‘I see nobody partly because I have nothing to say except Oh! shall I ever have anything to say except Oh!’16 She felt anxious and ‘very lonely’
as though exposed on a high ledge in full light … very apprehensive. As if something cold and horrible – a roar of laughter at my expense – were about to happen. And I am powerless to ward it off: I have no protection and this anxiety and nothingness surround me with a vacuum … I want to burst into tears, but have nothing to cry for. Then a great restlessness seizes me.17
As the sense of alienation develops with depression, suspicion and paranoia begin to appear. The depressive becomes afraid of leaving home. A business trip, a holiday, away from home, even a visit to the shops can be a terrifying ordeal, a fearful strain. Virginia was seriously depressed in 1913 when Leonard, against his better inclination, took her to stay in the Holford Inn. Her anxiety was overwhelming and she lost control of her mind. She became more and more deluded, convinced she was an object of derision and that people were planning and plotting against her. The hotel staff recognised she was ill and behaved ‘with the greatest kindness, sensitiveness and consideration but to no effect’.18 Paranoia grew until even Leonard could no longer be wholly trusted. She was reluctant to eat and mealtimes turned into a nightmare for Leonard, for by this time she was probably hearing hallucinatory voices.
Depressives, are frequently reluctant to eat, and not simply because of loss of appetite. The depressed Cowper believed everyone hated him and that his food was poisoned. Robert Schumann had similar delusions and, like Virginia’s cousin, starved himself to death. Virginia’s reasons for not eating were not wholly dissimilar. She was convinced ‘the voices I used to hear telling me to do all kinds of wild things … came from over-eating’;19 they had to be starved. Leonard was almost driven to breaking-point himself in 1913 trying to get Virginia to eat. ‘If left to herself she … would have gradually starved to death.’20 Similar behaviour was developing in 1941, and by the time of her suicide she was extremely thin.
Although she enjoyed food and drink when well (her description of meals can be mouth-watering), she had, according to Leonard, ‘a taboo against eating’. It was, he wrote, ‘extraordinarily difficult ever to get her to eat enough to keep her strong and well’.21 Leonard perhaps over-emphasised the problem, partly because he believed her mental stability depended on maintaining a ‘good’ weight, but also because Virginia became noticeably more anorexic when Leonard was worried and irritable and fussed over her food.
Sexual appetite is lost from the start. Virginia’s physical libido, never very strong, rapidly disappeared. During the most passionate time of her affair with Vita Sackville-West, although she was disappointed not to receive a visit she was ‘yet relieved at the same time’. Even during hypomania, when sexual appetites sometimes overflow, Virginia’s sexual interest was as much intellectual as physical.
Depression is uniquely painful. Cowper saw it as ‘the most terrible dismay of the soul’,22 and many a believer has compared his sufferings to the torments of Hell. Unlike a physical pain which, however unbearable, can be related to part of the body and, in a sense, isolated, the pain of depression involves the whole being. The depression is the pain. William Styron thought it like ‘drowning or suffocating’.23 Suicide may seem the only escape. Virginia ‘did most emphatically attempt to end it all’ in 1913.24 Before her suicide in 1941 Virginia left a last note for Leonard saying, ‘I can’t go through another of those terrible times … I can’t fight any longer. I know I am spoiling your life.’25
An alternative to suicide is to accept the pain, as Hector Berlioz did: ‘One power was left to me – to suffer, to embrace madness.’26 Cowper, in despair after having failed to kill himself, ‘now began to look upon madness as though the only chance remaining. I had a strong foreboding that it would fare so with me, and I wished for it earnestly.’27
That was never Virginia’s wish. She was terrified of madness and when normal took precautions against a recurrence by drinking milk and maintaining her weight – ‘unless I weigh nine and a half stones I hear voices and see visions and can neither write nor sleep’ – and retiring to bed and ‘lying still directly my head aches’. Yet she recognised that insanity had its attractions: ‘as an experience madness is terrific’, she informed a friend. Like Charles Lamb after his recovery, she looked back on ‘many hours of pure happiness … of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of Fancy’.28 She remembered ‘lying in bed, mad, and seeing the sunlight quivering like gold water on the wall. I’ve heard the voice of the dead here. And felt, through it all, exquisitely happy.’29
Virginia’s depressions were often ushered in by ‘a dribbling little temperature’, invariably diagnosed as influenza.30 Influenza, or what passed for influenza, was seen as a potent cause of depression by psychiatrists, and Virginia’s general practitioner repeatedly warned of its ‘dangerous effects on the nervous system’.31 Genuine influenza can leave its victims depressed, but Virginia’s descriptions do not match up with true ‘flu’. The raised temperature during cyclothymic depression, not at all uncommon, was caused by the depression and was not the cause of it.
At the beginning of the 1920s Virginia’s depressions increased and a repeatedly raised temperature of 99 was investigated by specialists, who came up in turn with heart disease, trouble in the right lung, infection around the teeth (three of which were unnecessarily extracted) and ‘pneumonia germs or ‘flu’.
She was bothered by ‘dropped beats
’ – of no real concern but alarming to someone depressed – and when she was exhausted her heart might begin to race ‘like galloping horses got wild in my head’. Her back ached, limbs felt ‘fidgety’, and pain sometimes stabbed her chest.32 There were moments when she felt on the point of death.
The cyclothymic depressions lasted usually between two and six weeks but they could be prolonged by stressful situations into many weeks. In 1936 Virginia was ill for most of the year as a result of a long period of strain, and she was depressed for nearly four months before her suicide. Minor short-lived depressions lifted abruptly, but more severe episodes often fluctuated up and down before finally resolving. Then followed a period of calm until the hypomanic phase occurred.
Hypomania is a lesser form of mania. Kay Jamison described her own experience as ‘a light, lovely tincture of true mania … tiresome to my friends, perhaps; exhausting and exhilarating to me, definitely; but not disturbingly on the top’.33 Life becomes more vivid, colourful, brighter, entrancing. Appetites increase. The mind bubbles and takes magical leaps over hitherto unclimbable mountains. When hypomanic Virginia would waken early, bursting with energy and zest, her mind full of ideas and plans for current and future work. She saw herself in a confident positive light. Gone was the fear of failure, envy of her sister, desire for children. Books were her children and she saw them stretching like a magic carpet into the future. Naturally sociable when well, she now invited ‘shoals of friends’ for weekends and accepted every invitation to luncheon and dinner with her intimates, as well as to grander parties and social occasions where she was one of the chief centres of attraction. She lost her usual reserve and could be wickedly witty, weaving a cloud of fantasy around some embarrassed guest, sparkling ‘with gaiety, delicate malice and gossip’. Fellow guests fell under her spell and, ‘listening to her, forgot love affairs, stayed on and on into the small hours’.34 Leonard always had cause to feel anxiety at such times, for with over-excitement and late hours exhaustion and depression were liable to follow. More than once she collapsed physically, usually after returning home.