Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

by Viviane Forrester

The scene bears no relation to the rest of the novel; there is no need for it—except as a release valve for Virginia. There is no sequel to it, and it could go unnoticed in the thick chronicle. What escapes through Sara is a certain madness, out of line with the conventional saga unfolding.

  Sara’s cousin, North, comes to visit and is chatting with her; they haven’t seen each other in a long time, and the conversation stops abruptly, interrupted by the sound of water. The water that runs throughout Virginia’s work, as though pointing the way to the River Ouse. But in other novels, it is the sea, waves, rivers, the water “like a drowned sailor on the shore of the world,” or that of “the depths of the sea…. only water after all.” Whereas here it becomes a matter of plumbing, loud faucets. It is the dirty water of the Jew, the other:131

  “The Jew,” she [Sara] murmured.

  “The Jew?” he said. They listened. He could hear quite distinctly now. Somebody was turning on taps; somebody was having a bath in the room opposite.

  “The Jew having a bath,” she said.

  “The Jew having a bath?” he repeated.

  “And tomorrow there’ll be a line of grease around the bath,” she said.

  “Damn the Jew!” he exclaimed. The thought of a line of grease from a strange man’s body on the bath next door disgusted him.132

  They share the same repulsion, as if it were a given. They listen to the running water again, the man coughing and clearing his throat while he scrubs.

  “Who is this Jew?” he asked.

  “Abrahamson,133 in the tallow trade,” she said. They listened…. “But he leaves hairs in the bath,” she concluded.134

  North feels a shiver run through him, asks if she uses the Jew’s bathtub. She nods yes. And he says, “Pah!”

  “Pah. That’s what I said,” she laughed. “Pah!—when I went into the bathroom on a cold winter’s morning—Pah!”—she threw her hand out—“Pah!”135

  When the Jew first appeared, Sara had thought of a river. She had run outside enraged, stopped on a bridge, amid a crowd. “And I said, ‘Must I join your conspiracy? Stain the hand, the unstained hand … and sign on, and serve a master; all because of a Jew in my bath, all because of a Jew?’”136

  Ravings? Revelations!

  What other body shares Virginia’s bath except Leonard’s, a Jew?

  But into the water of the River Ouse, Leonard never entered.

  He was the first to read these pages where Virginia Woolf, porous to all voices, intercepts the most vile of them this time, which is hers, and which, stifled until now, rises to an outcry. And which denounces Leonard Woolf.

  One type of water hardly runs at all through the Woolfian corpus: tears. But, according to Virginia, with this text, tears did run: Leonard’s. Virginia is not at all well after five tortuous years of working on this book she considers bad, “an odious rice pudding.” So bad, when she entrusts the proofs to Leonard she asks him to burn them unread and flees. “It was cold & dry & very grey & I went out & walked through the graveyard with Cromwell’s daughters Tomb down through Grays Inn along Holborn & so back.”137

  She feels “very tired. Very old. But at [the] same time content to go on these 100 years with Leonard.” They have lunch, she figures out how to repay the cost of the proofs and falls “into one of my horrid heats & deep slumbers, as if the blood in my head were cut off. Suddenly L. put down his proof & said that he thought it extraordinarily good—as good as any of them. And now he is reading on….” Two days later: “The miracle is accomplished. L. put down the last sheet about 12 last night; & could not speak. He was in tears.”138

  He says he finds this novel better than The Waves. But in his autobiography, he admits to having known “that unless I could give a completely favourable verdict she would be in despair and would have a very serious breakdown…. I had always read her books immediately after she had written the last word and always given an absolutely honest opinion. The verdict on The Years which I now gave her was not absolutely and completely what I thought about it.” All the same, “it was obviously not in any way as bad as she thought it to be.” But too long and “not really as good as The Waves, To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway. To Virginia I praised the book more than I should have done.”139 Those tears? They weren’t tears of emotion because the text was so beautiful, or even disastrous. So how to account for them? In these pages, he had just read the scene of the foul Jew, staining both the bathtub and the soul of the anti-Semitic Sara, who issues from his wife’s very core. Could they be tears of discouragement, rage, defeat, or even of simple sadness? Those tears, which he will not mention. Unless, of course, Virginia was exaggerating.

  Epilogue: The Years, which does not lack Woolfian charm, although it does lack her magic. The Years, deliberately more conventional, stylistically more sedate than her usual work, would be (is it any surprise?) Virginia’s greatest commercial success. In the United States that year, only Gone with the Wind would outsell it.

  Now to a taboo question: where among the countless, often magnificent books devoted to Virginia is her anti-Semitism discussed? So recurrent, spontaneous as a tic, expressed casually and as though a given, in keeping with her circle, why is it almost never mentioned, never or rarely alluded to, and sometimes even denied? For fear of turning readers against her? Because that would seem irreverent? Because no one wants to admit it? Because it’s not important, just “one of those things”? Because such disillusioning exactitude threatens the immunity and redemption granted her work? Because no one wants to tarnish its author or question the already suspect illusion of her “purity”? But also, why doesn’t it turn me against her and all that she offers?

  I have no answer, except that I want to hear it all; I want to be told everything.

  And because we neither live nor die in an innocent world. Must all authors be naïve strangers to those damaged places? Exempt observers, preserved from the evil they observe? Never its agents, always its witnesses and judges? The judges of what they do not commit? Or are they especially, above all, uncertain, at the mercy of the very worst that may inhabit them?

  Work, life, paths; people must be considered as a whole, all pointing toward consolation.

  A life’s paths lead in many directions, and Virginia Woolf’s paths can be unexpected, without compromising her absolute demand for exactitude regarding her passions and propensities. A demand usually met. She does not misjudge herself in this, or lack the courage to express herself. And her spontaneous, inescapable self-awareness would allow for natural evolution, so that shortly after demonstrating such clear, sane, exceptional political awareness in Three Guineas, she would affirm, without the least ostentation or appearance of contradicting herself, “we are Jews,” and speak of “our Jewishness” with regard to her marriage. This at the time when Nazism triumphs.140

  She would take part in antifascist movements, which was always her orientation, though anti-Semitism seemed a given, part of the unwritten family code, almost tribal in some way, and considered a form of savoir faire, proper to her circle—rather than an expression of its perversity and a key to the crimes that were about take place.

  Was she truly free from its grip, from the tradition handed down through generations? Yes, with regard to thinking, action, profession of faith—but at the visceral, unconscious level of her physical being?

  Perhaps anti-Semitism suited her to the point of becoming necessary to her, so that she never considered thinking about it, applying her intelligence to it, that intelligence that led her, in Three Guineas, to a political awareness running counter to such impulses.

  In 1940, it was as Jews and Socialists, only secondarily as writers, that Leonard and Virginia Woolf appeared together on the Third Reich’s blacklist.

  “We knew,” their friend the poet Stephen Spender, also blacklisted, told me, “that if the Nazis arrived, we would be sent to the concentration camps: we were on Hitler’s blacklist, and if the Germans landed, we would have to be arrested immediately.”141 In M
ay 1940, Leonard who, strangely, never considered resisting, proposed a joint suicide to his wife if the Germans invaded, which seemed imminent.

  A suicide … by gas. In the garage, he stockpiled gasoline. She immediately accepted. Here is Virginia Stephen included in the fate of the Jews, in solidarity with Leonard. And Leonard: “we discussed again calmly what we should do if Hitler landed. The least that I could look forward to as a Jew, we knew, would be to be ‘beaten up.’ We agreed that, if the time came, there would be no point in waiting; we would shut the garage door and commit suicide.”142

  Virginia’s version, almost identical: “This morning we discussed suicide if Hitler lands. Jews beaten up. What point in waiting. Better to shut the garage doors. This is a sensible, rather matter of fact talk. Then he wrote letters, & I too: thanked Bernard Shaw for his love letter.” But a few lines later, this protest: “No, I dont want the garage to see the end of me. I’ve a wish for 10 years more, & to write my book wh. as usual darts into my brain.” She has decided to follow Leonard, but “its all bombast, this war. One old lady pinning on her cap has more reality. So if one dies, it’ll be a common sense, dull end—not comparable to a days walk, & then an evening reading over the fire.”143

  The war—the tears it prompted even before it began and which Virginia remembers over the course of those months, “while all the guns are pointed & charged & no one dares pull the trigger. Not a sound this evening to bring in the human tears. I remember the sudden profuse shower one night just before war wh. made me think of all men & women weeping.”144

  The triggers, the guns worked. The garage was ready. France was going to fall, invasion threatened—“our waiting while the knives sharpen for the operation,” and June 9: “I will continue—but can I? … A sample of my present mood, I reflect: capitulation will mean all Jews to be given up. Concentration camps. So to our garage. Thats behind correcting Roger, playing bowls…. Another reflection: I dont want to go to bed at midday: this refers to the garage.”145

  Nine months later, she would end her life, alone. Leonard would survive her by twenty-eight years.

  A suicide results from a network of factors, not a single cause. It is not yet the time for us to go all the way to the River Ouse. Only to remark that because of his (justified) anxiety, Leonard, the pillar, the rock, proposes a joint suicide to a woman who has already attempted it and whom he considers fragile, verging on madness. The idea of suicide is thus introduced to her, very concretely and precisely, by the champion of reason within an arena that has turned tragic, and into which Virginia resolutely follows him. She very simply enters with him into the Jewish fate, without a shadow of theatricality and despite her desire to live.

  From anti-Semitic fantasies she moves to the reality of inhuman history. She shares the ordeal of the marked victims, those most threatened. Body and soul. She engages fully. With her whole being. “We are Jews.”146

  She seems unaware of the evolution she has undergone, on a personal level, in her marriage, and regarding antifascism as well. She may not necessarily have forsworn the hackneyed litany she unconsciously recited to condemn the Jews, but what pleasure would it give her now? Even Marie Woolf, her favorite target, has been dead and buried almost two years.

  The disorder, the unvoiced part of that disorder, the physical disgust, the fantasy of the Jewish body and the word “Jew,” that specific disease that surfaces only in The Years as the irrational, instinctive repugnance expressed by Sara, must have always lain beneath the deep understanding and harmony Virginia and her Jewish husband shared. And at this point the disorder itself becomes disordered, part of an imaginary construct.

  Or rather, with the war, this disorder alone remains, irrational, visceral, screened by its public expression, the blatant, hackneyed anti-Semitism so commonplace in their circle: the unwitting insults, the clichés automatically linked to anything Jewish. These stereotyped, knee-jerk reactions mask and in some way banish a certain irrational, hallucinated terror. For now, labeling Leonard “Jewish” is innocuous. But that label’s effect on Hitler cancels any other effect, makes it truly bad form.

  Without the store of insults, the anti-Semitic clichés, the physical presence and raw substance of a tangible “Jew,” of Leonard, remain. And everything they evoke of what is invisible and disturbing, disguised or even exorcised until then by the hackneyed anti-Semitic repertoire, aimed at stereotypes, not live bodies. The atavistic loathing remains, perhaps, but goes unvoiced now. Impossible to express henceforth. To consciously feel.

  Will Virginia’s perception of Leonard change now that she cannot set him apart from other Jews? Might she lose some of her authority over him, now that he is freed from the label that allowed her circle to judge him … in a case already decided against him, since Leonard Woolf was a Jew. “We are Jews,”147 says Virginia Stephen now.

  Perhaps renouncing her racist fantasies, or banishing them, made her more fragile? A whole network of unconsidered landmarks collapses with them, a solid structure, a part of her personality, a familiar hysteria upon which they may rely. That exhilaration of acquired dominance, being in league with her circle, the arrogance of a kind of condoned cruelty punctuated her life, and perhaps she felt protected in the narrow, rigid corset of arbitrary certitudes and spitefulness. But especially in the stasis of fixed beliefs, within a space constricted enough for doubts and anxieties to fade, without room for oscillation; in holding racist positions whereby the pain and dreaded humiliation are blindly inflicted upon others, while personal rejection shuts them out.

  It will not be gas that will do in Virginia Woolf ten months later, but water. The water that runs throughout the work, that calls, drowns, surrounds, attracts her from all sides and toward which Virginia, spellbound, is headed all her life, going there to be swallowed up, “exhausted swimmer,”148 the body lovingly embraced by water. “There was an embrace in death.”149

  And now….

  And now, it is to Virginia the newborn that we must return, to Virginia Stephen, then to Virginia Woolf and their secret, and those of others.

  In passing, we will learn … who Leonard married. And especially, who lived this life devoted to detecting life, reviving it, extracting it from its futility, capturing it in her pages, saved from lifelessness, fixed in its transience.

  Before accompanying Virginia on her journey, let us follow Leonard, who goes on without her to live to the age of eighty-eight. The years that would follow reflect upon the preceding ones. They make up part of Virginia’s existence.

  It took three weeks to find her body. Only Leonard would attend the cremation. The sublime cavatina of Beethoven’s Thirteenth Quartet would not be played, though they had remarked one evening when they were listening to the music (Leonard kept a list of the records they listened to) how well it was suited to a cremation. “There is a moment in the middle of the cavatina when for a few bars the music, of incredible beauty, seems to hesitate with a gentle forward pulsing motion—if played at that moment it might seem to be gently propelling the dead into eternity of oblivion. Virginia agreed with me…. When I made arrangements for Virginia’s funeral, I should have liked to arrange this.” But he was unable to arrange it. “The long-drawn-out horror of the previous weeks had produced in me a kind of inert anaesthesia. It was as if I had been so battered and beaten.” To his indignant surprise, Gluck’s “Blessed Spirits” was played. After returning home that evening, Leonard listened to the cavatina.150

  Alone, he buried her ashes at the foot of one of the two elms, their branches entangled, that they had named Leonard and Virginia. The tree would be uprooted one stormy night.

  Leonard is alone. He changes nothing in his professional life. As early as the next day, he would go to see their lawyer. He refuses invitations. Vita describes for Harold her visit to Rodmell:

  The house was full of his [Leonard’s] flowers, and all Virginia’s things lying about as usual…. There was her needle-work on a chair and her coloured wools hanging over a sort of litt
le towelhorse which she had made for them. Her thimble on the table. Her scribbling block with her writing on it…. I said, “Leonard, I do not like your being here alone like this.” He turned those piercing blue eyes on me and said, “It is the only thing to do.”151

  He wrote this note found with his papers at his death:

  They said: “Come to tea and let us comfort you.” But it’s no good. One must be crucified on one’s own private cross.

  It is a strange fact that a terrible pain in the heart can be interrupted by a little pain in the fourth toe of the right foot.

  I know that V. will not come across the garden from the lodge, & yet I look in that direction for her. I know that she is drowned & yet I listen for her to come in at the door. I know that it is the last page & yet I turn it over. There is no limit to one’s stupidity and selfishness.152

  But Leonard would not be the stoic, solitary widower of Rodmell, vestal for a sacerdotal wife, forever in the grip of his ruined marriage, as we might have imagined. Less than a year later, the austere Leonard falls madly in love. A passionate love affair that would last twenty-seven years, until his death.

  No one would be surprised by it: Trekkie Parson is blonde and round, jovial, with a keen sense of the prosaic, the most mediocre of painters. She will not leave her husband, Ian Parson, a publisher like Leonard, with whom he would graciously share his wife, especially since he himself is having an affair that makes Trekkie jealous. Her relationship with Leonard would remain platonic; this time the alibi is age and his long abstinence, officially blamed on Virginia.

  Trekkie soon replaces Virginia at Rodmell, without ever separating from Ian. A three-part arrangement: Trekkie Parson divides her time between Leonard and Ian, spending weekends and some vacations with her husband, weekdays and other vacations with Leonard. They often find themselves a threesome. The Parsons will become Leonard’s tenants in his London flat; they buy a house in a village neighboring Rodmell.