Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

by Viviane Forrester

  Thirteen years earlier, To the Lighthouse had appeared, those pages haunted by Julia Stephen, alias Mrs. Ramsay, who is able to capture the excitement, incorporate it, offer it to her eight children, to friends invited to her enormous seaside summer home, all of whom depend upon the meaning she gives to them, as Mr. Ramsay depends on it, her tormented, begging husband. All of whom are drawn to her, the woman who asks herself, facing the long dinner table where the residents gather and while she fills their plates: “But what have I done with my life?”7

  Mrs. Ramsay, whose weaknesses we can guess: her taste for power, her desire to seduce, her capacity to withdraw, her emotional rapaciousness, and the disarray beneath her many, delightful, slightly faltering perfections. Mrs. Ramsay, whose death is going to ravage a world nevertheless unchanged but whose survivors will suffer “the old horror”: “to want and want and not to have.”8

  Her illusion: Virginia believed that through the Ramsays she had overcome that horror, exorcised the haunting, absent mother and father, and with them, their defection that “wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again.”9 But Mrs. Stephen escapes forever, even from Mrs. Ramsay. To the Lighthouse exorcised nothing. The memory remains incarcerated in the desperate waiting for what was (or what never was) in a world forever on hold, where things and beings become signs of what can only be called absence.

  Here, a mother’s absence seals shut her past and leaves no smiling image of her.

  But being dead, it seems (it seems to me) that Julia does laugh sometimes, now settled in, and that accurate memories of her do not dare surface. The day that Virginia received the 1928 Femina-Vie Heureuse Prize for To the Lighthouse, for instance, Elizabeth Robins, formerly a great Ibsen actress, told her during the reception that her mother was not at all like the dying swan of the sublime photos taken by her aunt, Mrs. Cameron, the famous pioneering photographer, nor like Leslie Stephen’s languorous memories, and “she [Julia] would suddenly say something so unexpected, from that Madonna face, one thought it vicious.”10

  The face of a madonna. So much beauty. Mrs. Cameron’s photos, which seem dated today, testify to it. Julia Jackson, then Julia Duckworth, perfection itself. A little too smooth, according to Leonard Woolf, who considered the famous splendor of the Pattle family women, of whom Julia’s mother was one, too feminine and not female enough. He preferred the Stephen side in Virginia and Vanessa, tougher, more masculine, which gave them character in addition to harmony, according to him.

  Before her premature death, her premature aging, Julia (now) Stephen’s face hardened, as if shattered, and she had an air of utter hopelessness and spite, even beyond the personal resentment that she seemed to embody in many of her earlier photos. She died at forty-nine years old and looked more like seventy. Such a discrepancy between the dazzling, youthful ingénue and the same woman in her mature years, suddenly aged, savage, disappointed, even vindictive. In the last photos, surrounded by her family, she seems not to be there and, more than ever, not to want to be there.

  Julia Stephen’s legend portrays her as exhausted, destroyed by the demands of Leslie Stephen, the domestic tyrant, sapped by his exploitation of her, by her life as a tragically sacrificing wife and mother. Whereas she was self-sacrificing, worn to a thread … but elsewhere, with others and despite the timid requests of the “tyrant,” at a time when wives were supposedly restricted to the home.

  Julia, who signed petitions against the suffragettes, was nonetheless often freed from her Victorian Angel in the House duties, from her house at least, to embody another cliché of the era, going about doing good in the community “as a sister of mercy,”11 according to Leslie Stephen. She felt equally called to all suffering, the bedside of her sick parents, death watches over relatives, troubled friends in need of consolation, London slums, Cornwall paupers. She rushed from one to the other, sometimes traveling long distances for some days.

  “When she had saved a life from the deep waters, that is, she sought at once for another person to rescue, whereas I went off to take a glass with the escaped,”12 recalled Leslie, her husband.

  Stella, the oldest, still a child, thus took charge of the house, the family, colds, meals, lessons, while Julia devoted herself to the passion that was her ruin and rushed off in all directions to care for the sick and afflicted, who were tactful enough to suffer bad health—even to die—a good distance away: from her husband and eight children, seven of which are hers.

  Seven children. And what monopolized her, held her captive, simultaneously paralyzed and impassioned her—what, behind the “very quick; very definite; very upright” woman made her “the sad, the silent” absorbed woman—was the memory of her first three children’s father, the unique, incomparable Herbert Duckworth, whose accidental death four years into their marriage seemed somehow to have killed Julia too. At twenty-four, she would spend hours prostrate on his grave, pregnant with their third child. She announced, “All life seemed a shipwreck,” and she was tempted to let herself founder. A fascination with water, its tragic promises. Virginia saw her mother as “an exhausted swimmer, deeper and deeper in the water.”13

  So many images that would not leave her alone.

  Julia Duckworth pulled herself together. She had lost her faith and “flung aside her religion.”14 In a state of vengeance. In a state of fury. Unexpressed resentment. Deliberate absence.

  Rejecting those who had a claim on her, offering herself to those who expected nothing from her, because such devotion took on meaning as a vocation stemming from her grief, an edifying response to her broken life, a corollary to the tragedy of Herbert Duckworth, that is to say, a permanent tie to him. She would nevertheless live out the rest of her life fully and tenaciously … even as she turned away from it.

  The care she so unsparingly lavished upon others is all the more striking for being unexpected; almost public, even showy, it conferred upon her an air of altruism, provided her her own domain. Gave her the right to be unavailable; never “more than a few minutes”15 reserved for Virginia, who early on sensed Herbert’s presence when her mother, often so distant, so sad and absorbed, seemed to be dreaming of him. And Virginia dreamed with her.

  Julia’s magic spells. And, not the least of them, reticence. Leslie Stephen claimed to have loved even her reticence when he went on about her, subjecting the dead woman’s children to endless babble about their mother’s love for him, a love she rarely demonstrated while alive, trying to persuade them, and himself, through his excessive theatrical grieving, which would lead him to reveal more intimate facts about their marriage than Julia would ever have tolerated.

  Julia’s ambiguities. Despite her deficiencies or because of them, they left Virginia with dazzling, delightful images. For example, the image of Julia finally nabbed by Virginia, descending the stairs with her, arm in arm, laughing, or letting her choose among her jewelry which to wear one evening. Julia, always on the stairs. Virginia asks her how Leslie courted her, and she doesn’t answer. And the sound of silver bracelets, and the voice at night that sometimes suggested, before sleep, that she think of shining things, “rainbows and bells.”16

  And then Julia, the “omnibus expert,” sitting in her “shabby cloak” near the driver, indignant that the bus company did not provide him straw to keep his feet warm. “Your feet must be cold.” Julia accompanying Stella to dances, she herself surrounded by the suitors of the daughter she was chaperoning, whose successes, whose wooers “excited many instincts long dormant in her mother.” She loved the young men confiding their secrets to her … and it was Stella, she complained, who “would insist upon going home, long before the night was over, for fear lest she should be tired.” Stella, who worshipped her, always in her mother’s shadow, “that passive, suffering affection,” Virginia would write. A mother who did not like Stella and who called her “Old Cow,” this girl almost as beautiful as she had once been, a little plainer perhaps, and who bore for her an “almost canine” devotion. Before their marriage, Leslie would try
to call Julia’s attention to her harshness toward her daughter, in vain. He would not insist.17

  Julia’s sly humor, sending Virginia to go “tease” Leslie, too attentive to a seductive American, Mrs. Grey, having her whisper in his shocked ear to stop flirting “with pretty ladies.” And Julia’s austere grace “as she came up the path by the lawn of St Ives; slight, shapely—she held herself very straight,” remembers Virginia, who adds: “I was playing. I stopped, about to speak to her. But she half turned from us, and lowered her eyes. From that indescribably sad gesture I knew that Philips, the man who had been crushed on the line and whom she had been visiting, was dead. It’s over, she seemed to say. I knew, and was awed by the thought of death. At the same time I felt that her gesture as a whole was lovely.” The gesture indicating death.18

  Virginia no longer distinguished Julia’s beauty from these details, mixed emotions, contradictory sides. Beauty that she accepts “as the natural quality that a mother … had by virtue of being our mother. It was part of her calling.”19 And that was enough for childhood, for that time to unfold happily, dynamically, even jubilantly, under the maternal aegis, no matter how capricious the mother. Julia’s swings were undoubtedly noticed and distressing, especially after their tragic interruption, which rendered every missed opportunity poignant, irreversible.

  A before. An after. The big, dark house at Hyde Park Gate, in an elegant London neighborhood, seems at first like a nest where brothers and half-brothers, sisters and half-sisters comfortably nestle. Life was more serious and studious there than at Talland House, the summer home rocked by the waves, “one, two, one, two,” a bright, sparkling spring surrounded by flowers, scented with every youthful joy under the Cornwall sun of St. Ives. Virginia the cricket champion writes: “Vanessa and I were both what was called tomboys; that is, we played cricket, scrambled over rocks, climbed trees.” Every moment something fun; The Hyde Park Gate News kept by the family, its only readers: chronicles of everyday life, recorded especially by Thoby and Virginia, soon primarily Virginia, and her first thrill as author when Julia notices one of her entries and gives it to a friend to read: “It was like being a violin and being played upon.”20

  And then … the whip struck for the first time. “The greatest disaster that could happen.”21

  The lips, still warm, that one night pronounced: “Hold yourself straight, my little Goat.” Addressing a child brought to see her mother alive for the last time; and at dawn, the cold face, of which touching cold metal would always remind her, the dead face that Virginia kissed before going to the window, saying to herself that she didn’t feel anything except the desire to laugh because one of the nurses was pretending to cry, while she watched Dr. Seton head down the street and Stella caressed her mother’s cheek and opened a button on her nightgown: “She always liked to have it like that.” Passing her widowed father stumbling, distraught, from the death chamber. Virginia reaching out for him and being pushed away. The father wrapped hastily in big towels, given a few drops of brandy in milk. And the pallid Stella watching over them all, considered as slow as she was beautiful, but showing true genius when Virginia, distraught, confessed to her that she saw a man sitting beside the dead woman. Stella, a bit frightened herself, saying after a moment: “It’s nice that she shouldn’t be alone.”22

  And all that could no longer not have been.

  But all that had been, where had it come from? How had this family come about? How had Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, Adrian come to exist? How had Leslie Stephen married the eternally shipwrecked Julia and usurped Herbert Duckworth, the eternal prince charming?

  And who was Leslie Stephen, minor philosopher, highly respected intellectual, surrounded by writer friends, among them Thomas Hardy, William Meredith, and Henry James? A former priest of the Anglican Church, he was one of the first English mountaineers, loved the Alps, and helped to found the famous Alpine Club.

  And where did Virginia’s mute fury toward him come from? Her desperate resentment and rage, as well as her equally desperate attachment? They surface in her diary and especially in Moments of Being, a posthumous work that includes, most importantly, two notebooks of memories recorded many years later by a Virginia forever ravaged by the eros of childhood and its libidinous currents; by urges and desires, frozen by grief, crushed by the living, yet emerging alive in these impatient pages from the past.

  Two times, thirty years apart, Virginia revived and rehearsed the same history, the same scenes from her childhood and adolescence, and sounded the same complaint. Nothing had healed her. Not age, not the work, not her varied, intense, and often rich life, not even her hardships had diverted her from the original mysteries, parental figures, major suppressions. Time, work, their passions had only nurtured and intensified the original pain. Virginia Stephen, at twenty-five years old, in Reminiscences, and then Virginia Woolf, at fifty-seven years old, in Sketch of the Past, returned powerless, ecstatic, and horrified to the time of plenitude and its interruption, then to death and incest. To the crudeness and savagery of an existence that appeared to be utterly civilized.

  At fifty-seven as at twenty-seven, she circles around and around the same events, without ever coming to the end of them. And at the center we find not Julia, but Leslie.

  It is he who would haunt Virginia to the last, torn as she was by hate, love, but especially repression. It is he who would represent danger. A mention of him in her diary, even in passing—even a simple reference to mountains, especially the Alps, Leslie Stephen’s domain—and there, a few lines or pages or days later, we find depression. Manifest. It at first seems like coincidence, but it isn’t, it occurs systematically.

  Her project, four months before her suicide: “I think of taking my mountain top—that persistent vision23—as a starting point”; a week before her death, she writes again to Lady Tweedsmuir: “All this afternoon I’ve been trying to arrange some of my father’s old books.” For months, she has been absorbed in Leslie’s books, papers, letters, while around her unfolds that war whose end she will not witness.24

  Thus, on June 20, 1940, John Lehmann met them for lunch and, deathly white, “his pale eyes paler than usual,” announced that France had stopped fighting. “Whats to become of me?” writes Virginia that evening in her diary. And two days later, on June 19, she notes down the circumstances under which she is recording old memories: “Today the dictators dictate their terms to France.” In what will posthumously become Sketch of the Past—an immersion into her troubled youth, troubled especially by Leslie Stephen—she writes of an organ grinder in the square, the heat, a man selling strawberries. Virginia goes on: “I sit in my room at 37 M[ecklenburgh S[quare] and turn to my father.”25

  Recalling how for a long time, until the publication of To the Lighthouse, she would catch herself moving her lips and silently laying into him, arguing, silently unleashing her rage toward him, revealing to herself what she did not say to him, what “was impossible to say aloud” and what she was finally trying to write here, at fifty-eight years old, but does not formulate, would never formulate, not even for her eyes alone, not even in thought: “How deep they drove themselves into me, the things it was impossible to say aloud.”26

  Like no one else, Virginia Woolf knew how to delineate, to capture and convey all those things still marked by what forbids them; but these things no one would hear, not even she who harbored them, knew them, did not say them; did not say them to herself, identify them, or free herself from them. Lurking in the shadows but felt, they would not leave her, linked to the livid hell that Hyde Park Gate became once Julia was dead and yet endlessly, obsessively invoked, harped on by Leslie. Who henceforth made this mother, undoubtedly elusive but lively and captivating while alive, into the dead object of his insatiable, unquenchable sexual desire.

  Grief foundered at Hyde Park Gate, monopolized by the father’s anguish alone, obsessed as he was by his wife, a fetish bordering on necrophilia, which he imposed upon Julia’s children, forbidden to grieve with hi
m around their shared memories and their shattered life, which together they could have mourned. Around a collective wound. Maimed children faced with the passionate instincts of a personally and physiologically frustrated man; children struggling with their urgent, insatiable plea for what, they knew, would never be again.

  Emphatic to the point of obscene, Leslie dispossessed Julia’s sons and daughters of their grief—those who were adults and already orphans, Herbert’s children: George, Stella, and Gerald Duckworth, twenty-seven, twenty-six, and twenty-five years old; those from his own marriage: Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian Stephen, sixteen, fifteen, thirteen, and twelve years old. All were overwhelmed by Leslie’s exhibitions of need for their mother, the missing object of his libido and not the beloved being, mourned by each of them, whose absence they all shared.

  Leslie would make this loss the excuse for horrid scenes, sordid hours, an insidiously incestuous atmosphere. Misfortune was converted into the worst calamity.

  “Quite naturally unhappy,” Virginia and her siblings came to “almost welcome” “the sharp pang” that was “recognizable pain,” even to take a kind of comfort in that inexorable but identified, anticipated distress, compared to the dubious atmosphere surrounding them that “hideous as it was, obscured both living and dead; and for long did unpardonable mischief by substituting for the shape of a true and most vivid mother, nothing better than an unlovable phantom.”27

  Damaged: both the memory and the mourning; with his shameless contortions of widowhood, Leslie Stephen discredited them.

  In the last photographs of the couple, he and Julia both look extremely old and seem to compete for moroseness; both appear sullen and severe with their young band of children (whose sour-tempered grandparents they could be, exhausted by life). It’s hard to imagine Leslie ever capable of infatuation. His frustration? It dated back a long time! The merciless shock, the wound of grief must have reawakened it, renewed the awareness of an older deprivation, habitually hidden until then and suddenly freed by a horrible jolt. Shaken loose was his long-buried sexual, sensual life, his paralyzed urges. What he lamented, through the wife he memorialized under all his talk, was also his inability to claim what he must have felt ready for again, open to again, although it was too late: a whole sexual arena, which seemed foreclosed to him.