Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

by Viviane Forrester

  Now, among any of their contemporaries who mention her, no such portrait emerges, nothing even close; and Virginia, who records daily whatever assails her, troubles or joys, does not mention a single incident (much less recurrent ones) of hysterical passersby; on the contrary, she is continually delighted by her happiness, even her intoxication, wandering the streets of London, walking there for hours. “London is enchanting. I step out upon a tawny coloured magic carpet, it seems, & get carried into beauty without raising a finger…. One of these days I will write about London, & how it takes up the private life & carries it on, without any effort. Faces passing lift up my mind.”76 Her photographs testify to her beauty, which increased, and did, in fact, vary with her moods. Her contemporaries bear witness to …

  No! That’s not the question, no need for such testimonials. Why does Leonard’s judgment even matter?

  The real question concerns his choices, his priorities, his selective memory; the dryness of his account when it involves Virginia, in contrast to his relative enthusiasm for his other subjects; it concerns the discrepancy between the tone of these pages and Virginia’s, the unkindness, intentional or not, in these first references and the mute, unconscious aggressiveness that seems to lie beneath them.

  The question? It concerns this almost hallucinatory entry, this initial, so naturally antagonistic approach; it lies in the order, the strange sequence of incongruous memories; the minor place Leonard gives the woman whom, he will announce tersely a few pages later, he has fallen “in love with”77; in the grotesque situations attributed to her, in the lack of tenderness, or even sympathy or respect, for her. Rather a kind of revenge, it seems to be an instinctive confession. The expression of a long buried, undeclared contention finally acknowledged. And nothing of all that struck the author in rereading the text, a familiar exercise for the great editor that, among other things, Leonard Woolf had become (as had Virginia).

  Such an introduction to his wife, such a preface to his account of their life together, is, at the very least, surprising. Doesn’t Leonard’s memory include a single image of Virginia that would place her in the company of those idols he so admired, like Thoby, Rupert, or Vanessa, kindred spirits in heart and mind?

  And what to think of certain unexpected leaps? For example, from the paragraph that ends with Virginia’s death: “On March 28 she drowned herself in the Ouse,” to the following one that begins with: “I must return to the subject of our income.” And what to think of the single (written) memory of their honeymoon (in which she does not appear): being hungry on a boat carrying them from Spain to Marseilles. They had practically not eaten because of their travel schedule, so: “At 7:30 in the morning I staggered up on to the deck and found the Third Officer who spoke English. I explained to him that I was very hungry and why. He took me up on to the bridge and had breakfast sent to me there; the first course was an enormous gherkin swimming in oil and vinegar. One of the bravest things I have ever done, I think, was to eat this, followed by two fried eggs and bacon, coffee and rolls, with the boat, the sea, and the coast of France going up and down all round me.” Then there are three lines about Venice, but only about the weather, describing the wind: “whistling through its canals, [the wind on the Grand Canal] can sometimes seem the coldest wind in Europe. And at the end of November we returned to London.”78

  Strange glimpses, strange memories—especially strange in their selection, the priority certain ones are given. Are they still stamped with the impressions of the Leonard Woolf who still did not like women and chafed against the future destined to him in India, from which only Virginia Stephen could save him? Dependent as he had been on her, on her decision to marry him, on the stability and status she provided him … was he ever able to forgive her for it? And between them we will encounter so many other points of contention, even within their deep affinities.

  Strange, yes, strange entrances for the actors in this retrospective. Apocryphal recapitulation of his own life by the Leonard we have known as young, foundering, volcanic, at bay, cursing fate, suffering … this Leonard who will subsequently be banished. Absent from an autobiography devoted to illustrating an existence entirely balanced, satisfied, scholarly, and centered, never mentioning the tormented, impervious, furious, terrified man that Leonard long continued (or never ceased) to be, whom he hides here again, or has learned to forget.

  Ongoing oscillations…. Throughout his memoir Leonard furiously erases the place held in his life by what he wants forgotten; his systematic omissions are all that can protect him. Resulting in the version that verifies, through so much exorcism, the deceptions he rehearsed following his return from Ceylon.

  What survives in these pages is a path of serene wisdom, certitude, and amnesia, traced to the detriment of the man Leonard had once hoped to become, whose life he would surely have been able to assume, inhabit, lead to the end, but who was evicted: that young man exiled from Cambridge, vibrant with despair, developing through hardships the nervous tissue of a poet, that is to say, the true writer he could have been and whom he had kept mute for decades in the body of this octogenarian who was now recounting his life without revealing it.

  And in comparison to Leonard’s landmarks … the sudden desire, the need to encounter here something precise and tangible, listening to Virginia Woolf not as she appears fixed in her husband’s discourse, but as the Virginia who contemplates time and summarizes what is in question, what really does and does not happen, thus: “One incident—say the fall of a flower—might contain it. My theory being that the actual event practically does not exist—nor time either.”79

  Which serves as one example of what Leonard lost along the way: the right to hope to create, beginning from what he alone could say, beginning from what he alone had achieved, apart from the rest. He is left with the ability to listen, to follow, and to publish the kinds of works he would no longer write. And, as a writer, to produce many other kinds of works, essays, political pamphlets, in which he could avoid anything personal. Only Virginia remained free to risk the ordeal of endless self-searching, while he would flee from himself, behind his impassive mask. But did he flee or was he chased?

  For he had spoken. Written. Confessed. Risked. He had spelled out his truth, confided it, conveyed it, precisely, in all its convolutions, in all its subtlety, with the simplicity of exactitude. That was after his return from Ceylon, at the very beginning of his marriage, in his second novel, The Wise Virgins.80 Note the initials of the title: reversed, they are Virginia’s.

  Guilelessly, he had laid out what he would never speak of again. His fury and unease, the anguished spirit, the calm, lucid derision, the indecision, the bittersweet renunciations, the youthful rage, the ultimate numbness of the young Harry Davis, Leonard’s double. Which would unleash in his circle, cruelly exposed, such rancor, even such suffering as only the utter failure of the work could make them forget.

  The book could only founder. It was to be drowned immediately in silence, rejection, denial, shock: it was to be killed even before the battle. Its publication in 1914 altered nothing. It was ignored. Death by nonreception. Permanent leave. The novel, which naïvely exposed what went unsaid and innocently addressed taboos, had committed suicide. Unwittingly, unintentionally subversive, sincere, Leonard, at his own risk, had given himself away. Unsuspecting, through Harry Davis, he had proclaimed his unresolved differences, his otherness. His weakness. He had shown himself vulnerable.

  To let surface in these pages the insignificance perceived by the terrified Harry Davis, the hopelessness of his resistance, the endless oppression of the banal, and most importantly, the sickly, frantic role of sexuality in his life, which finally traps him, he must expose the intolerable, ordinarily eluded: that infinite sadness, which goes beyond the tyranny of sex, which hints at what it may conceal of sexual misery.

  But also, by proclaiming through his hero, and in all their violence, the distress, rage, pride, embarrassment, challenge of calling oneself and feeling oneself to b
e a Jew (without the least religious allegiance, the least pious sentiment), he is stripped of the armor that allowed him (and would allow him henceforth) to appear deaf to insult and takes refuge in indifference, so as to consolidate and affirm his place among those who offended him.

  From Lytton, even from Lytton, he had concealed those wounds. It was understood between them that they could discuss anything without scrutinizing it. The casual tone of Cambridge and the Apostles, which Bloomsbury would inherit, elegant and supple, cynical when need be, would sweep him along. When Strachey described to him a successful playwright, a Jew, whom he had met among Bertrand Russell’s friends, as “utterly vulgar with the sort of placid, easy-going vulgarity of your race,” and was outraged by “how many thousands roll into Sutro’s circumcised pocket per year,” Leonard had answered from Jaffna: “Your Jewish parties with Mrs Russell are nothing to my perpetual existence here.” But The Wise Virgins exposes his distress at such insults and injuries, suppressed, as here, in complicit silence.81

  In this book, he betrays this silence that authorized the habit of insult, anti-Semitic cracks taken for granted. He reveals a presence, his own, constant and conscious. Suffering and targeted. He imprudently reveals himself as vulnerable, fragile, vehement. For the last time.

  With the work soon forgotten, his circle could speak in his presence once again and yet remain “among themselves.” In 1930, Harold Nicolson, a diplomat, would nevertheless express doubts; in his personal diary, regarding a meeting on the social qualifications necessary for entering the Foreign Office: “The awkward question of the Jews arises. I admit that is the snag. Jews are far more interested in international life than Englishmen, and if we opened the service it might be flooded by clever Jews. It was a little difficult to argue this point with Leonard there.”82

  Had he read this private document, would Leonard have reacted, defended his obvious right to exist, the same as Nicolson’s, as an Englishman? It seems unlikely. Henceforth, he would remain impassive toward what perpetually hung in the air, apparently benign. Woolf, the leftist, the influential Labor Party figure, would overlook the political content of such discrimination, all the more perverse for being unconscious. When Virginia announced to friends at dinner that “the Jew”83 would answer their questions, he protested mildly that he’d speak only if properly addressed. That was the height of his rashness; no fear of him causing any scandal. But in his professional and private life, his authority prevailed. Respect, great esteem, even admiration surrounded him until the end. A reasonable trade-off?

  This much he had understood: nothing more would be heard from him of his inner life, that very exile from which the impulse to write and to confide derives. Any record of rejection, of his own enigma, of his singularity would be banished before having been considered. Scotomization. Woolf would never again be that writer; he would forgo awareness of his isolation and focus on remedying it, and in order to do so, keep quiet about it. No more states of the soul, reports, confidences; nothing of his truth, his desires, or lack of them.

  He would no longer approach that which was intimate, since his unconventional sexuality would be taken as utmost indecency, an aggressive obscenity, not even to be considered. Above all, in order to retain his place among those he had chosen (which would partly form, around him and his wife, the Bloomsbury group), he would pretend to ignore that exotic status they would secretly grant him. To make them forget it, he would seem to stand with them, taciturn, when Jewish specificities (usually derogatory) were discussed.

  He kept quiet. Virginia spoke.

  “Then the curtain rose. They spoke.”84 Isa and Giles, at the end of Between the Acts.

  But Leonard and Virginia?

  Countless exchanges between them. Endless affinities. Unshakeable foundations. But what did not have a place, what separated them, what they did not mention, weighed more heavily still—too heavily.

  The curtain had not risen.

  Unless …

  Unless they had done away with it unknowingly, unintentionally, instinctively, at the end of a long journey. Poignantly: the first lines of The Wise Virgins come to join the last lines of another book: the last book by Virginia, Between the Acts.

  “In the beginning,” writes Leonard Woolf in 1913 or 1914, on the very first page of his second and final novel, “he and she lived in a cave … or they burrowed holes in the earth.” Huts and caves will become houses where we discover the man “jealous for the woman who has come to him, despite the clergy man and the gold ring, as she came to the cave, to be possessed by him and to possess him and to bear him children in the large brass bed.”85

  “Before they slept, they must fight; after they fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born,” writes Virginia in Between the Acts, in 1941, in the last line of the last paragraph of the last book that she would ever write. “The house had lost its shelter. It was the night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among rocks. Then the curtain rose. They spoke.”86

  Let us leave them together.

  Because they were, together. Inseparable.

  She, often in love with their life, enchanted by their marriage, by its song and its security. “‘Are you in your stall, brother?’” is how she describes their coexistence, and she delights in their divine solitude one day in October 1938, at Rodmell, their country house where they so often stayed:

  I said to L. as we strolled through the mushroom fields, “Thank the Lord, we shall be alone; we’ll play bowls; then I shall read Sévigné; then have grilled ham and mushrooms for dinner; then Mozart—and why not stay here for ever and ever, enjoying this immortal rhythm, in which both eye and soul are at rest?” And for once, L. said: “You are not as silly as you look.” We are so healthy, so happy, and I returned, I put kettle on, took the stairs four at a time, looked at the almost neat room, beautiful fireplace, logs in a bad way, but I was still soaring on the wings of peace. Prepared the tea, took out a fresh loaf and honey and I called L. from high up the ladder against a big tree—where he looked so beautiful that my heart stopped for pride at the idea that he had ever married me.87

  He, more secret, stubborn, having achieved his goal, faithful and constant, eminent, clinging fast to the prudent stability he has finally won. And she, transfixed with happiness when one day he declares her to be the most beautiful of women or slips into her bed one anniversary morning (they don’t sleep together) to give her a green handbag and sweets, or if they enjoy taking off to Brighton for the afternoon to buy those chocolates they adore and all the newspapers before he takes her to a movie and then to a tea room. And especially if he admits his helplessness at the idea of being separated from her, even for a few days, and she decides not to leave for Paris: “You see it is enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife.”88

  Bound.

  But let us go back to their beginning, years earlier in London, when Leonard returned on leave from Ceylon in May 1911. He was constantly afraid. Afraid of asking Virginia Stephen for her hand, and even more afraid of not winning it and having to return to Ceylon. The year’s leave was coming to an end.

  In November, he wrote to Lytton this last item in their exchange:

  I saw Virginia yesterday. They have taken Brunswick Sq. [Virginia and her younger brother Adrian]. I am going to see it tomorrow as they can give me rooms there. I shall decide then. I see it will be the beginning of hopelessness. To be in love with her—isn’t that a danger? Isn’t it always a danger which is never really worth the risk? That at any rate you of all can tell me. I expect after two weeks I shall again take the train not to Morocco but to Ceylon. It is something to feel that it is always waiting there for one at Victoria.89

  Virginia, with her sister’s support, seems to have considered and greeted Leonard as a potential and welcome suitor. It was Vanessa who first invited the young man to dinner; it was Virginia who then invited him to the country, and who suggested that he take
rooms in the residence she shared with Adrian, who was by then Duncan Grant’s lover. Duncan, also a boarder, as was Maynard Keynes.

  Leonard moved in that fall. Since his arrival in London six months earlier, he had hardly encountered her, but those months he would remember as the happiest of his life. He would marvel at having led then an existence of “pure, often acute pleasure,” as he had never known before or after, in this rediscovered England, reunited with his friends. The six most beautiful months of his life came to an end as 1911 ended, and it was then, in January 1912 (the enchanted months forever over), that he fell “in love with Virginia” and asked for her hand in marriage. They were wed that summer.90

  She hesitated, in enough distress to warrant a rest cure. “I only ask for someone to make me vehement, and then I’ll marry them!” Leonard did not make her vehement. She does not hide it from him, says she is vexed by “the strength of your desire. Possibly, your being a Jew comes in also at this point. You seem so foreign….” She asks him to wait and warns him: “Again, I want everything—love, children, adventure, intimacy, work…. I sometimes think that if I married you, I could have everything—and then—is it the sexual side of it that comes between us? As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments—when you kissed me the other day was one—when I feel no more than a rock.” Perhaps, without knowing it, she thus reassured him, seemed to offer what he hoped for—or feared—something less degrading? But most importantly, she admits to her surprise sometimes at “being half in love with you, and wanting you to be with me always, and know everything about me.”91

  Woolf makes his wager, resigns his post. Waits.

  And Virginia accepts him.

  Then the series of letters from Virginia on the topic announcing, as to Violet Dickinson: “I’ve got a confession to make. I’m going to marry Leonard Wolf [sic]. He’s a penniless Jew.”92 A penniless Jew who is giving up a great career for her.