Adrian was amused by Virginia’s eagerness to seduce Leonard upon one of his first visits.
It was too funny, after coming in she went up deliberately and changed her costume in spite of the fact that it was pelting with rain put on her best Turkish cloak and satin slippers and so on. Saxon, Woolf and I were kept waiting while she did all this and then we had to take a taxi. She made great eyes at Woolf whom she called markedly Leonard which seems to be a little forward. Her method of wooing is to talk about nothing but fucking and [illegible] which she calls with a great leer copulation and WCs and I dare say she will be successful, I hope so anyway.35
A few weeks before Leonard’s return to England, Virginia seems almost to scream when writing, in the depths of depression: “Did you feel horribly depressed? I did. I could not write, and all the devils came out—hairy black ones. To be 29 and unmarried—to be a failure—childless—insane too, no writer.”36
Yes, they could each provide the other the status they lacked.
Of course they would discover that they had more in common with each other than with most of their circle. They also had Thoby in common, who had recently died at age twenty-five. Thoby, Leonard’s close friend and Virginia’s favorite brother; among her long list of bereavements, her most persistent ghost.
It was Thoby who first mentioned Leonard to Virginia, she would remember, as “a man who trembled perpetually all over [Leonard’s right hand had a permanent tremor, as did his father’s]. He was as eccentric, as remarkable in his way as Bell or Strachey in theirs. He was a Jew. When I asked why he trembled, Thoby somehow made me feel that it was part of his nature—he was so violent, so savage; he so despised the whole human race. ‘And after all,’ said Thoby, ‘it’s a pretty feeble affair, isn’t it?’ Nobody was much good after twenty-five, he said. But most people, I gathered, rather rubbed along, and came to terms with things.” Thoby thought it sublime, Woolf did not: “I was of course inspired with the deepest interest in that violent trembling misanthropic Jew who had already shaken his fist at civilization and was about to disappear into the tropics so that we should none of us ever see him again.”37
Of course Leonard and Virginia would not have married each other if they had not in some way “recognized” each other, and the lukewarm prelude to their marriage did not prevent them from becoming a true couple, based on an enchanting, permanent, potentially fulfilling attachment—undercut by uneasiness, lies (those one tells oneself), and especially, growing contention.
Nothing is ever Manichean, nor often simple. In the smallest fraction of the most tenuous moment, only indistinct, simultaneous, confused elements; whereas composing an account of them, making something of them, requires choices and development. Virginia knew that: to a large extent, it serves as the basis for her work; the moment, which she makes ring like crystal, intercepted as is, unresolved, sprung from, drawn from the real, but issuing from a world at odds with the false compartmentalizations that mask reality.
It was not the facts that were detrimental to Virginia, but the carefully constructed tableau imposed by Leonard. It was his trafficking with immediate memory that led her astray. We can trace it in Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, which recounts his life, beginning with his return from Ceylon, as he told it to himself, his own version, which he needed to achieve the life he chose. He had to forget the humiliated, nearly destroyed young man who already thought of Virginia Stephen as his last hope and, regarding Ceylon, for example, he had to remember only the competent, steady civil servant, too refined for such work, destined to a great and fascinating career in the colonies.
But Woolf seems to have forgotten that his letters to Lytton might appear in print, testifying to a more personal and entirely other reality. No doubt he had repressed all memory of their tone and content, so different from the self-portrait he would leave. He did not foresee how comparing them would refute the long-established legends.
Like the one of Leonard falling suddenly in love with Miss Virginia Stephen and only then deciding to ask for her hand in marriage, which required him to renounce the brilliant colonial future opening before him. “What a career you’re ruining!”38 Virginia would sigh, moved and flattered.
But how can we forget Leonard struggling in Ceylon, suffocating, trapped, mortified, with no way out, and Lytton suggesting that his friend marry Virginia in order to extricate himself, and how can we forget Leonard realizing immediately that it was the “only thing to do”? That was in 1909, three years before the long-awaited leave, which Leonard would convert into a definitive return and his reentry into the only circle compatible to him. It all became possible thanks to his marriage … with Miss Stephen in August 1912.
His response to Strachey three years earlier in Ceylon? Marrying Virginia? “The final solution…. It certainly would be the only thing.” It is as if it were done: Leonard lived perpetually, he said, “on the principle that nothing matters.” He concludes: “I don’t know why the devil I don’t.” All the same, he adds later: “Do you think Virginia would have me? Wire to me if she accepts.”39
Lytton’s perversity: he is the one who proposes to Virginia! She was under the spell of his deep originality, his importance or the importance he audaciously claimed, the charm and mordant intelligence that, without knowing it yet, still too shy, she shared with him, but to her own share she added … all that Lytton lacked. He would long impress her, often as a rival: she was sure (and jealous) of his literary worth and imagined him, mistakenly, destined to magnificent, lasting renown. She would always be pleased and flattered by their exchanges. Above all he was someone very dear to her. In 1924, she would write again, after he had come to dine with her and Leonard: “Oh I was right to be in love with him 12 or 15 years ago. It is an exquisite symphony his nature when all the violins get playing as they did the other night.”40
Immediately terrified, horrified by his own move—and the idea that she might kiss him—then, to Lytton’s great confusion, Virginia accepted the proposal. The next morning she retracted it—or was led to do so by her panicking neo-fiancé. She confessed to not loving him, allowing him to make an honorable retreat, as he wrote, still trembling with fear, to his brother James Strachey.
But can’t we imagine his pleasure at promptly informing Leonard, and again urging him to court the woman he didn’t want? Panic-stricken, upset, he claims that she would have been his for the taking, had he been “greater or less…. You would be great enough,” he adds, before turning to the chief cause of his distress: Duncan Grant. Duncan with whom he has just “copulated … again this afternoon, and at the present moment he’s in Cambridge copulating with Keynes.” The letter then turns to Woolf’s poetry. Oh, what trials!41
Leonard is still suffering in exile:
You cannot imagine the effect of your letters in Hambantota. They make me laugh & cry out loud. To imagine that really Sanger & Bob Trevy & MacCarthy & Virginia exist! I suppose they do in some dim existence move vaguely through life. I suppose everything isn’t jungle & work. But it’s damnably difficult to believe it…. I believe in the reality of you & (the reality of the unreality) of Turner, because if I didn’t I suppose I should cease to believe in my own.42
Such lines make him so endearing (in my eyes, at least) that we mourn the brevity of his career as novelist—only two novels. Never would he confess (and especially not to Virginia) what Lytton alone knew. Never in Leonard Woolf’s life after that time, much less in his autobiography, would there be any sign of the suffering, simultaneously faltering and confident man he had first been.
Yet what a strange suitor he would make!
Lytton persisted: “You must marry Virginia. She’s sitting waiting for you.” He knew, he guessed how much she wanted to be married, which he insinuated and which Leonard understood. A miracle that she existed, so “young, wild, inquisitive, discontented, and longing to be in love,” continued Strachey. The only woman intelligent enough for Leonard. Dangerous to wait, he warned; Woolf risked missing “the o
pportunity.”43
And Woolf once again acknowledged that “the one thing to do would be to marry Virginia.” What stopped him? “The horrible preliminary complications, the ghastly complications too of virginity & marriage altogether appall me.”44
How not to think here of the reputation for frigidity that would haunt Virginia Woolf, and of the sexual prowess, expert and sacrificed, that would be credited to Leonard?
I remember my first meeting with Quentin Bell in 1973. He was participating, with his delicious English accent, in a series of radio programs I was producing on—guess who! In person the most exquisite and jovial of men, Quentin spoke with kind indulgence about his aunt, whose importance he considered to derive primarily from her relationship to Clive and Vanessa Bell, his parents. Vanessa possessed the wisdom, good sense, and social integration that her sister lacked (as we shall see later). And in 1973, little or nothing was known of Virginia herself, of her life, of those close to her, except what her nephew wrote about her, with great charm and liveliness, but with even greater unintentional bad faith, for he was writing atavistically, out of his fidelity to the family tradition. His biography of Virginia Woolf had just appeared in French.
I remarked: “You show her to be a very complete, very intellectual woman, who loved life in all its forms.” At which point he immediately interrupted: “From the perspective of sexual life, one cannot call her a complete woman. She was cold. She was not normal from this perspective. In other relationships, yes, she was normal.”45
“Not normal!” That was exactly the label Virginia dreaded and bore; Bell’s account testifies above all to her circle’s more or less implicit rejection of Virginia as she was: the brilliant, famous Virginia Woolf, often arrogant, even fierce, irresistibly funny, as well as the uncertain one, so vulnerable to suffering, to the horrors that often assailed her. Of Virginia the writer, accessible only in her work, who, in order to accomplish it, had to draw on her torments and to renounce the defenses that would have allowed her to avoid them, but only by forfeiting her direct access, harsh as it was, to what she desired.
Virginia Woolf, invincible and disarmed.
In 1973, Quentin Bell’s word was law, yet I had to ask him if that “abnormality” hadn’t sparked in Virginia her sense of nature, of life, and influenced her writing? Above all, hadn’t she experienced her own sexual “normality,” which was not restricted to the sexual organs, neither to condoned patterns of sexuality nor to those considered forbidden? With which she was familiar?
Appalled, Quentin let out a pained, indignant protest: “That coldness!”46 Before sighing, conciliatory but no less reproving, and saying that she “saw the world in a very unusual way.” He then recounted the lovely remark made by Clive, his father: “For the rest of us, life’s great business is the adventure of love. For her, it is when a butterfly comes through the window.” And that was true. As well.
Dear Quentin! He did not even need to say the word to make it heard: “frigid,” and frigid, Virginia disappeared into the ridiculous. Invalidated. She became a writer, but was deprived of the right to speak of sexuality. She could write novels brimming with sensuality, not a word lacking sexual potential? No matter. Hers is an alternative view of the libido’s distribution? She’s an outlaw. She doesn’t adopt or conform to the common cliché? She’s cold. She derives pleasure directly from her writing? You could say she’s dreaming, she’s sublimating. She expresses negation, frustration? Well, you can see that! She’s not a real woman—since she does not embody a disembodied woman.
“That coldness!” groans her nephew regarding a woman whose every sense was perpetually on alert and who lived forever permeable to the world—which was a living organism for her, entirely erotic, in which she participated, eagerly, attuned to and awaiting all its pulsations.
The wild sexuality that runs through her work, that cannot be reduced to one conventional act and never focuses on a bed, can be disturbing and even terrifying, but especially can take us aback. Lytton reproached Virginia for including not a single scene of coitus. Indeed. But did Strachey believe he could thus defuse the subversive sexuality that underlies these pages, so diffuse that it is indistinguishable from the text? “I’m sure I live more gallons to the minute walking once round the square than all the stockbrokers in London caught in the act of copulation.”47
Sensual, yes, the work of Virginia Woolf, but sexual as well, in the sense that the tension, potentiality, and genius of sexual pleasure and its orgasms are everywhere invoked, coveted, attained. Suggested in various ways. Physical as well is the need to induce the writing to become a corporeal, connected, joined being, capable of experiencing and inciting rapture. The orgasm.
Sexual beings, Virginia Woolf and her work, but not according to a binary model. Few authors have written as she does, starting from an atmosphere imbued with sexuality, determined by sex or the lack of it. Of the Holy Grail, the forbidden, the sexual divide, few have written as she does, restoring sexuality intact, not named but permeating the moments, destinies, the scenery, and encompassing as well the frustrations, disappointed or rejected passions, the distances, the impotence that are all part, a significant part, of sexuality.
She is aware of an immense, general coitus, of the throbbing orgasm within which each human orgasm flutters and moves, and it is with each detail, each minute, each living organism of whatever species that these pages attain sexual pleasure, it is with absence that they couple. The erotic presence is distributed throughout multiple neural networks of infinite complexity. The exchanges do not take place where we normally observe them, but in the language itself, in its intervals and interstices, “between the acts,” in short, the title of her last work.
Or rather, they do not take place at all and desire prevails, unresolved, maintained in abeyance—in the state of desire. “The old horror come back—to want and want and not to have.”48
In To the Lighthouse, it’s the living presence of Mrs. Ramsay, dead for years, that Lily Briscoe desires in vain, straining against the intractable and, like Virginia after so many early losses, confronting this loathed finality against which she is endlessly shattered. “To want and not to have—to want and want—how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again.”49
But what Virginia desired was something else too, something else that she still lacked desperately in 1923, four years before the publication of To the Lighthouse, when she wrote in her diary: “And as usual I want—I want—But what do I want? Whatever I had, I should always say I want, I want.” But what? The impossible, of course, the dead coming back to life; the work under way finished, of course, and the next one already …, and then, and then…. But also, and perhaps above all, the carnal closeness, denied her, of other desiring bodies, mutually enacting, fulfilling those desires—in a word, coitus, Lytton Strachey would mock. Yes, but not only that. But that as well. Perhaps above all, an embrace that would not be death’s, but equivalent to the power of death, which Mrs. Dalloway also thought was “an attempt to communicate.”50
Yes, because ironically, in everyday life, even in the narrow sense that her nephew understood it, it does not seem that Virginia was so hostile to the everyday forms of sexuality. Unlike Leonard. Of the two, he is the one who finds sex repulsive, she the one who safeguards him from it.
Evidence shows that sexual rejection was not Virginia’s doing, but her partners’—Leonard and also Vita Sackville-West—given their equivocations, their frightened retreats not from the “coldness” Quentin Bell names, but rather from her fervor, her anticipation. Her “excitement,” as Leonard says. “Ça lui dit trop,” worries Vita.51
Unwitting testimony from Woolf, who hopes, on the contrary, to demonstrate the stubborn unresponsiveness of his companion: he confides in Gerald Brenan, a writer friend of Lytton, in March 1923, the very year when Virginia wrote: “I want—I want. But what do I want?” The Woolfs, on vacation, stopped to see him in the small Spanish mountain village where he lived, and Brenan remembers:
“Leonard told me that when on their honeymoon he had tried to make love to her she had got into such a violent state of excitement that he had to stop, knowing as he did that these states were a prelude to her attacks of madness. This madness was of course hereditary…. So Leonard, though I should say a strongly sexed man, had to give up all idea of ever having any sort of sexual satisfaction. He told me that he was ready to do this ‘because she was a genius.’”52
There it is.
Brenan hears it before Bell.
As far as genius goes, Leonard was one too, for turning situations to his own advantage, as here, for acquiring over Virginia an influence that he would let be known within his circle, so that each of its members would subsequently attest to it. He provided an intimate portrait of Virginia Woolf, which he created, he believed, in the liberated Bloomsbury style, as we will see. Quite a dirty move, actually, revealing one of the ways he will use Virginia’s alleged (“of course hereditary”) “madness.” Throughout their marriage, Virginia would have to adapt to the version of her own life continuously invented by Leonard, in real time. Just as she would have to submit to the consequences he inferred from it, sometimes very serious ones—in particular, being deprived of children.
Most importantly, it is not a cold, passive woman, nor one adverse to sexual pleasure, that we discover in the confidences shared with Brenan. He does not call her disinterested, repulsed, but “excited”—in what sense? That of a potential lover, expectant, responsive, easily aroused?
A disaster for Leonard!
And he does not persist, fears her eagerness, hopes against hope for the opposite reaction. He is more terror-stricken than she is by how “ghastly” the undoubtedly clumsy “preliminary complications” might be. She is not the one he wants to protect by interrupting the act; it is he who withdraws and flees, terrified.53
Virginia Woolf: A Portrait Page 3