Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

by Viviane Forrester

  The Parsons’ interest? This bond with Woolf will let Ian, clearly aided by his wife, achieve one of his dreams: for a long time he has watched for the opportunity to acquire for Chatto & Windus (his own publishing house and one of the biggest in England) the Hogarth Press, the Woolfs’ publishing house, much smaller in size, but the premier press of its day, among the most sophisticated and prestigious.

  An impassioned, enthralling business for the couple and of major importance to Leonard; an immense triumph, carried out together with astounding, unforeseen success and creating a permanent bond between them. Leonard will take on more responsibility; editing will become his profession, his public identity, even more so than author, man of politics, or publisher; Virginia’s will always be limited to writer.

  When they bought (on sale) a printing press and installed it in their dining room in 1917, Leonard and Virginia hardly imagined that they had just founded one of England’s most distinguished publishing houses. Their chief goals were to maintain Virginia’s stability—she had just emerged from a serious crisis—with the help of a concrete occupation in her realm of interest, and to amuse themselves by printing and publishing a few texts written by them and their friends.

  Hard to imagine them just starting out, immersing themselves in the work, trying to print two short stories, one of his, one of hers: “Three Jews” and “The Mark on the Wall.” Thirty-two pages. One hundred fifty copies. And printing, sewing, gluing, bungling, binding, quarreling, preparing parcels, gluing labels, tying them up, and carting them to the post office.

  An article in the Times Literary Supplement, and orders ensue:

  We came back … to find the hall table stacked, littered, with orders for Kew Gardens. They strewed the sofa, & we opened them intermittently through dinner, & quarreled, I’m sorry to say, because we were both excited…. All these orders—150 about, from shops & private people…. And 10 days ago I was stoically facing complete failure! The pleasure of success was considerably damaged, first by our quarrel, & second, by the necessity of getting some 90 copies ready.153

  They tackled Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude next, and soon bought a more modern press, as the first one printed only one page at a time. Soon they would seek out other printers, but for a long time they would continue to print certain works themselves in their dining room, binding them in the pantry.

  Having become a renowned publishing house, the Hogarth Press, which began in Richmond, would always be part of their London residence. Printers, bookbinders, authors were received there. The room where Virginia wrote would serve as warehouse. “She had a large stripped wooden desk in it, surrounded by the piles of parcels of Hogarth books straight from the binders, which also overflowed into the corridor,”154 remembers John Lehmann, who worked at Hogarth in 1930.

  Even when the Hogarth Press was thriving and Virginia was famous, she would lend a hand in emergencies. When orders flooded in following the release of a new book, she would always work in the room with the employees, tying parcels, gluing labels. In a holiday atmosphere, joking, eating biscuits, while “young authors, coming in to leave a precious manuscript and dreaming of encountering the famous author, would never suspect that they were actually in her presence as the figure in the drab overalls busied herself with scissors and string.”155

  She would read manuscripts up until the end, literary ones, attentively and passionately. Leonard would read them all, including the essays. How many writers worked as closely with books as she did? How many were as familiar with the humble tasks of book making, which granted her a physical knowledge of books? She often noted in her diary when her hands trembled from carrying packages. Ink-stained hands that handled typeface, fingered paper, tied bundles. She and Leonard shared the tasks of selecting binding paper, finding cover illustrations, distributing the books.

  The Woolfs always bore the entire financial risk for an enterprise begun with no capital. Few writers, and even fewer at that time, understood the business and technology of the literary profession as Virginia did. Her muscles, her body had experienced the actual weight of books, parcels of them; countless volumes she and Leonard themselves supplied to local bookstores on the automobile tours they took regularly as late as 1940. To a friend, Virginia asserted that the Hogarth Press was more work than six little brats.

  Leonard instantly, intrinsically, became an editor and proved to be an unparalleled businessman, audacious and patient, an immediate authority in the publishing and literary worlds. As author and editor of his own work, he would stand by those he published; like Virginia, he could be both intimate and severe, and often very kind. The couple made no concessions in their choice of books and writers, and often rejected manuscripts from friends who were a part of their life.

  Improvising at first, but soon proving to be an exceptional administrator, Woolf was in love with Hogarth and would take care to maintain it on a human scale. Possessive, nervous, sometimes despotic, perhaps he let loose a bit here, let down the mask and voiced the hysterical protests he repressed elsewhere. John Lehmann, among others, bore the brunt of this. A writer himself, Rosamond Lehmann’s brother, he began working for the Hogarth Press when he was twenty-four years old; he lasted only eighteen months that first time, and he confided in me, still bitter:

  Nearly all the young men who came to work at the Hogarth Press—there had been four or five of them before me—found that excitability very difficult. Leonard exhibited a kind of jealousy, as though the press was the child he had never had. That did not surface at first, but later, life became very difficult when the newcomer really began to understand Hogarth, take an interest in it, and want to make decisions himself.156

  Virginia described his arrival to Clive Bell: “Young Mr Lehmann is now installed in the back room behind the W.C. at a small table with a plant which Leonard has given him on the window sill.”157

  Hogarth Press’s main asset: a top-quality, often innovative catalogue. T. S. Eliot was to be found there from the first, among other young poets, like Stephen Spender; Katherine Mansfield, R. M. Rilke, E. M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, Gertrude Stein, Christopher Isherwood, Keynes, Hölderlin, Melanie Klein, Henry Green, and so on. And of course, Virginia Woolf and Leonard. But also all the works of Freud, translated into English by James Strachey, whose authorized critical apparatus would earn an international reputation.

  It was that publishing house, that catalogue, which Ian Parson dreamed of acquiring. An old dream, dating back much further than 1938, the year John Lehmann returned to Hogarth, bought Virginia’s shares, and became Leonard’s partner (which did not change Virginia’s role in the least). Alice Ritchie, one of the Woolfs’ authors who also worked at the press, gossiped to her sister … Trekkie Parson: the Hogarth Press had been sold. Ian Parson reacts. Leonard denies it. Alice apologizes and writes to him: “The thing is that Ian has always had a day-dream of some sort of amalgamation between Chatto and the Hogarth Press. He often talked to me about it and when he heard, in the way of gossip, that the Press was sold he was in despair and begged me to ask you if indeed all hope for him was over.”158 That was the end of it.

  At least until 1946, eight years later. Virginia has been dead five years. The threesome they comprise with Trekkie has brought the two men closer. Leonard has become and fancies himself the beau of Trekkie Parson, still attached to her husband, still officially Ian’s wife, though she and Leonard are known as a couple who dance divinely together, entertain admirably, and like to drink. Leonard (whose wine cellar is well stocked) is, to their delight, most easily influenced.

  Trekkie designs book covers for Hogarth, where she spends much time and manages to spark conflicts between Woolf and Lehmann, as well as between Lehmann and herself. “It was after Virginia’s death that the real difficulties with Leonard began,”159 John Lehmann confided in me in 1973, and still seemed bitter, twenty-seven years later, at having seen his life thrown off course. He had not read the letters in which Leonard Woolf responds to Trekkie’s complaint
s and supports her against Lehmann regarding printing problems, telling her to let him know if John “bristles” and doesn’t give in.

  Woolf himself gives in. Ian buys the shares from John Lehmann, who, being too impulsive, finally makes a false move. The Hogarth Press is subsumed into Chatto & Windus, the larger publishing house, and is no longer exclusively Leonard’s, even though, as full partner in the new company, he continues to direct it, with full editorial freedom guaranteed.

  Mrs. Parson’s entry into Leonard’s life does not seem without advantages for Mr. Parson, whose dream has now become a reality. A coincidence? Alice Ritchie’s letter raises questions about what transpired between Ian and Leonard, one absorbing the other’s enterprise and fulfilling a lifelong wish. And Leonard, so stubborn, so tenacious, renouncing his possessiveness, his demand for exclusive rights to Hogarth, and declaring himself grateful to Ian Parson—he insists on this in the autobiography—for helping him get rid of John Lehmann, out of the kindness of his heart….

  Much later, when he steps down amiably because of his age, his letter of resignation will nevertheless express some bitterness, alluding to that promised but severely limited authority and editorial freedom.

  No matter!

  A new Leonard emerges on the scene, passionately in love, transfixed. Their correspondence has now been published: “Tiger, darling tiger,”160 his “dear queen,” was thirty-two years younger (although she hardly seems so in photographs). Imperturbable duo: he, always the more ardent and dependent, and willingly so; she, calm, epicurean, solidly grounded, ably controlling his life.

  They would travel extensively together. Among their destinations: the United States, Israel, Canada, Greece and even … Ceylon. Returning with great ceremony, Leonard is received there as a hero. There where The Village in the Jungle is still a best-seller. He even took Trekkie to Hambantota. She would be fascinated by the birds there.

  Their deep, shared passion for gardening, animals, flowers (which she painted prolifically) created a symbiosis between them. She sent him dismaying poems, which he admired. She truly loved to paint, but was (justly) considered an amateur, a good student of painting, except by Leonard who, unlike Ian Parson, saw in her a great artist and encouraged her. Her paintings are not exactly crude, only mediocre. She did produce a handsome, if academic, portrait of Leonard, and one drawing for which we can almost forgive her anything. An Annunciation in which the Angel appears in the open countryside to Leonard who, hands in his pockets, looks right through him and says: “I don’t believe a word of it.”161 If the caption is Trekkie’s, hats off to her!

  The former circle, especially the Bloomsbury contingent, is still there, but they maintain their distance from the Parsons. Leonard retains his role among them, without Trekkie. As before the war, they still gather as the Memoir Club, where Keynes, Grant, the Bells, Forster, and others read, each in turn, from sometimes shocking, unadulterated memoirs in which the pathos is heightened by being shrouded in humor. Here, for example, Virginia read “Am I a Snob?” or “22 Hyde Park Gate” or “The Old Bloomsbury.” Her portrait hangs on the wall now, beside Roger Fry’s and Lytton Strachey’s, all three dead. Leonard attends regularly, now immune to all subtle, possible, and improbable anti-Semitic barbs, either more or less implicit. He has escaped that mire, he has crossed that threshold. Since the war is over, has the time of discrimination and its arrogances passed? Sometimes it seems doubtful; traces of it remain.

  One example: Christmas 1944. For the English, the war has basically ended; the Nazis are defeated. The truth is out about the genocide, the camps and their atrocities. Virginia is dead. So are so many others. In London, there is peace. Keynes and his wife, Lydia, are giving a costume ball. Vanessa, preparing for it, reports she has “been busy routing out our old theatrical properties—a mask for Clive, and other garments to make him look like a very obscene little girl. Duncan is making himself a wonderful wolf’s mask. Q’s [Quentin] Father C[hristmas] is a horrible old Jew who will terrify the children.”162 After Auschwitz, it is still the Jew who is terrifying!? And horrible? Apparently!

  Three decades later, in the 1977 preface to Virginia’s diary, Quentin Bell writes well-meaningly that, following the premature death of Leonard’s father, “the Woolfs met this catastrophe with the supple fortitude of their race.”163

  Leonard Woolf actively manages the posthumous work of Virginia, publishing it successfully, including a volume of extracts from the diary, unpublishable in its entirety as long as those whom she spares nothing are still alive … that is, everyone. A note in one of her two farewell letters to Leonard asks him to burn all her papers. He sells them. Correspondences, letters sent or received, personal diaries, manuscripts in various stages of completion, photographs, and other documents. They are all in New York, part of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, where access to them must now be requested.

  Leonard’s papers will be offered to the University of Sussex by his heir and sole legatee, Trekkie Parson, on the condition that the university buys Monk’s House, which she now owns.

  In addition to a considerable sum of money, the inheritance includes the Rodmell property (house, grounds, and two cottages) and a London flat. Also, all the returns from Virginia’s original modest fortune, the Hogarth Press, Virginia’s work, Leonard’s publications, and his compensation for directing the press.

  With Ian’s support, and backed by his lawyers, Trekkie proves intrepid in the face of the Woolf family, among them brothers and sisters, or their descendants, who have very little money. The Parsons will sell the London flat, evicting Cecil Woolf, Leonard’s aged, impoverished brother, who is entitled to stay there and will put up a fight but will eventually back down, accepting a paltry compensation.

  Ian Parson discovers an error committed by the lawyer: according to Trekkie (who was present at one of the dictations of the will before the lawyer), a bequest of five hundred pounds each was provided for two of Leonard’s nieces and one of his nephews; whereas he indicated five thousand pounds on the written will. Trekkie refuses to relinquish that share, which she considers to be hers. The Woolfs take legal action against her. A scandal ensues. Headlines in the newspapers. The Parsons stand firm. They won’t share a single cent of the booty, and it doesn’t matter that they themselves are well off and many of the Woolfs are destitute. Two years of litigation before the Parsons agree to a settlement.

  Trekkie? No doubt she loved, and especially appreciated Leonard over the course of almost three decades, at the end of which, it is true, she was seen much less at Monk’s House. But Virginia Woolf’s husband did not lack for female admirers glad to share his golden days … sometimes to the point of upsetting his “beloved Tiger.”164

  All the people in this book, whose names and traces remain, would have remained forever unknown, forgotten, if they had not been linked to Virginia Woolf, sometimes if they had not merely crossed her path. In his old age, Leonard himself would remark that the world wouldn’t be the least changed if he had simply spent his life playing Ping-pong!

  But what about Virginia? Let us discover her alone….

  Part 2

  THE adolescent bicycling down the streets of London is a ghost, unless, flesh and blood, she is moving among fantasies. She lives between two worlds, each of which destabilizes the other. She struggles in these Victorian times, clings to details, to the everyday, takes note of it; she is afraid of horses, of the accidents they cause in the city thoroughfares, where she notices the dangers everywhere. Dressmakers terrify her, with their fittings, make her want to stab them with their own scissors (she is joking here, she is not mad). Books reassure her; she consumes them one after another, devours them. She …

  She has lost her mother.

  Her mother is a depraved dead woman. Elusive in her lifetime. Like everyone else, you say? Yes, but she is dead. It was two years ago; her daughter was thirteen years old. The other six children …

  Her mother’s words to her before she died:
“Hold yourself straight, my little Goat.”1

  Her mother’s death portends other deaths to come.

  After the death that followed her mother’s, the daughter remembers saying to herself: “But this is impossible; things aren’t, can’t be, like this.”2

  And we have seen that, at fifteen years old, she wrote: “How is one to live in such a world?”3 (she is fifteen years old here, on this page). Her name is Virginia.

  Her mother, who is dead, was named Julia. She was named Julia Jackson, Julia Duckworth, Julia Stephen, over the course of her birth, her marriages, time. Julia Jackson and Julia Stephen are dead. Julia Duckworth as well, and Stella Duckworth, her daughter from a first marriage, would soon be dead. Virginia’s half-sister. Two years after their mother. She was twenty-eight years old.

  “The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?” It would descend again and Virginia Woolf would describe Virginia Stephen: “my wings still creased, sitting there on the edge of my broken chrysalis.”4

  1895. With Julia, Virginia lost what she never had: her mother, elusive. When she was not dead, Julia Stephen was absent. If present, she was unavailable. “Can I remember ever being alone with her for more than a few minutes?”5 her daughter would sigh. Dead or living, she slipped away, became the very essence of lack, the mark of absence. But how to intercept that absence (and with her death, the absence of that absence), how to seize hold of it? How to bring back to life what never was? How to safeguard it? How even to evoke it?

  Virginia would struggle her entire life to define, to discern the absence that she had lost. To safeguard, recover, restore it. Forty-four years later, in 1939, World War II was approaching and Virginia was still searching for that perpetually lost mother. Virginia had already written in 1907: “How difficult it is to single her out as she really was; to imagine what she was thinking, to put a single sentence into her mouth! I dream; I make up pictures of a summer’s afternoon.” The following year, in 1940, under bombardment and a few months before her death: “What would one not give to recapture a single phrase even! or the tone of the clear round voice.”6