Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

by Viviane Forrester

  Let us listen to the version Quentin Bell offers or rather invents, a version that will stand as part of the quasi-official account of her life. This was a period of valor in the face of mourning, a time of latent hope and struggle that Virginia navigated in an almost dreamlike way, as through a strange fog. The mark of it would remain, offered by Bell as the main theme of her destiny; Virginia Woolf’s legend would be built around it.

  He decides upon a serious “breakdown” suffered by Virginia at her mother’s death, “madness” that he admits leaves no trace and that no one remembers! It “must have” come over a young girl of thirteen, whose mother had just died suddenly.77

  Here is what Quentin Bell gives (or rather doesn’t give) as proof of these bizarre allegations, and here is the terrifying use he makes of them:

  The first “breakdown,” or whatever we are to call it, must have78 come very soon after her mother’s death. And here we come to a great interval of nothingness, a kind of positive death which cannot be described and of which Virginia herself probably knew little—that is to say could recall little—and yet which is vitally important to her story. From now on she knew that she had been mad and might be mad again.79

  Where did he get all that? It’s a mystery. From what evidence, what document, what testimony? None. A description? Impossible, he admits. She herself says nothing of it? That’s because she forgot it! But who remembered it? Silence. And nevertheless …

  And nevertheless Bell declares “vitally important” the version he advances, totally arbitrarily, in this first biography of Virginia Woolf, which becomes her effigy. Invigorated by the certitudes he has just advanced, listen to what he dares to assert next: “To know that you have had cancer in your body and to know that it may return must be very horrible; but a cancer of the mind, a corruption of the spirit striking one at the age of thirteen, and for the rest of one’s life always working away somewhere, always in suspense, a Dionysian [sic] sword above one’s head—this must be almost unendurable.” And in conclusion: “So unendurable that in the end, when the voices of insanity spoke to her in 1941, she took the only remedy that remained, the cure of death.” And there you have it!80

  Q.E.D.

  Leonard’s version is established.

  Nevertheless, a mystery remains: between the ages of thirteen and fifty-nine, her mind ravaged by cancer, her spirit thoroughly corrupted, Virginia Woolf really did write a few pages (one wonders how!), but the real question is: why the hell did she wait so long to do herself in?

  Of course, it would have been abnormal for Virginia at thirteen not to go through extreme states following the disruptive death of her mother, but no trace of that remains. Agitation? Dejection? Denial? Shattered nerves? We can imagine them all, but there is not a single bit of evidence. Even if she had gone through some very bad periods, even if she had suffered delirium or hallucinations, they would not have warranted Quentin Bell’s definitive diagnosis. A child’s sadness over her mother’s death, whatever her reaction’s magnitude and manifestations, would not have been a matter in itself of “madness,” especially in the sinister, simplistic, rigid sense that Quentin Bell uses the term. But more importantly, nothing attests to such behavior on Virginia Stephen’s part after Julia’s death. And still more importantly, Bell knows it!

  Furthermore, Virginia herself, who never recoils from the idea of “madness,” who would never have hesitated to mention and even to comment on such episodes if they had taken place, never refers to them anywhere, not even when she reconsiders (as she often does) this period of her past. And no one else alludes to them, not Leslie in his letters, not Vanessa later, no one close to her; not, through hearsay, a single acquaintance. Only Leonard, in his autobiography, speaks (obviously he doesn’t remember) of a first serious crisis and a suicide attempt following Julia’s death: at thirteen, Virginia supposedly threw herself out a low window without doing herself much harm. An actual event, but one that took place nine years later, at Violet Dickinson’s house and after the death of … Leslie, whom Leonard confuses with Julia!

  Quentin Bell presents his diagnosis like a definitive, established fact, drawn from proven, demonstrated information, even while he reports the absence of such information and offers only the diagnosis. Everything is invented, surmised.

  And that is how myths are born.

  Let us leave them and turn now to Virginia watching Stella Duckworth and Jack Hills approaching one summer evening near Haslemere. An anxious, almost mysterious evening. Jack has been pursuing Stella since Julia’s time, Julia having defended him against her daughter’s rejections. That honest young man, without great charisma, according to Julia, but with rare perseverance and very much in love, has finally won Stella over and opened her eyes to Leslie’s hold on her. He plays what has become an invaluable role in her life.

  It is 1896. Julia has been dead for a year. The Stephens and Duckworths are on vacation. Jack Hills has come by bicycle to dine with them. Stella takes him to see the garden. It is a “black and silver night,” as experienced by an ardent Virginia. A moonlit night. From the garden, the young Stephens see the couple pass by, disappear, pass by again; for a moment they hear the rustling of a dress, a whisper, then nothing more. They imagine that Jack and Stella have gone back into the house, return to join them, but find Leslie alone, agitated, crossing and recrossing his legs, watching the clock, fidgeting. A strange tramp enters the grounds; he is hungry; Thoby chases him off (!) with much commotion and the others are a bit afraid, “for it was no ordinary night, and ominous things were happening.” It is getting later, Leslie is pacing back and forth on the terrace; someone shouts: “Stella and Mr Hills are coming up the path together!” and Stella, usually so pale, arrives “blushing the loveliest rose colour,” to say “she was engaged.” Under her breath Virginia asks her: “‘Did mother know?’” and Stella “murmured, ‘Yes.’”81

  Breakfast. Adrian, the youngest Stephen, is crying. He was Julia’s favorite child, she called him “My Joy,” and the others have always kept him a little at a distance. His father prefers Thoby. Adrian is all alone and Stella, his refuge, is going away. Leslie gently lectures him: they must all share the fiancée’s happiness … although he complains to her a moment later that “the blow was irreparable.” He will prolong the couple’s wait, delay the wedding as long as possible. This engagement? Ten months of “clumsy, cruel, unnecessary trial” imposed by the moralist.82

  Stella’s life goes on, still burdened with the lives of others, with Virginia always at her side, whom she protects; just a few additional purchases for Jack, like the chocolate éclairs for his tea, a few more things to mend. Stella often visits him; he dines every evening at Hyde Park Gate.

  In her diary, which never mentions her mourning or her mother, Virginia reports on the uniformity of the days, takes pains to enter the events, to feel what they mean, but as though at a distance. She seems to mimic what should be felt, or else to violently reject some detail, only to embrace it immediately afterward, resigned. She struggles to merge her own presence into the world’s or to integrate the world’s presence, which shrinks away, except when she is reading, insatiably addicted to the authors whose works she devours like a glutton, dissolving into them, enchanted. Alive. Approaching the edge of herself.

  Nevertheless, Hyde Park Gate grows lighter, the future suddenly has a place there, the color seems to return as much to Stella’s cheeks as to her eyes, now “bluer,” to the “incandescence [that] was in Stella’s whole body.” “Something of moonlight” seems to emanate from her now. Filled with wonder, Virginia compares the love of these two young people to a ruby. Young people? Stella is twenty-eight, Jack, thirty-one.83

  By way of the approaching marriage, Virginia enters into the—now welcome—banality of the elite, not quite aristocratic, society; rituals are performed, related to the moment at hand, the upcoming wedding: rituals of a formidably conventional environment, which the two Stephen sisters will escape.

  Ceremony unf
olds according to protocol. Gifts pour in; invitations, dressmakers, hairdressers. Even Leslie, muttering that any old clothes will do just fine, orders himself a new suit. Stella takes Adrian along to buy him one as well. Ecstasy over the opal and diamond necklace Gerald gives his betrothed sister, as prelude to his promised wedding present. Presents flood in from everywhere. A dismayed Virginia shares the role of maid of honor with Vanessa. The banns are read, as they had to be then, as part of a religious service. And the family, solidly agnostic, searches everywhere for a few prayer books. During the ceremony, they don’t know when to kneel, and Virginia refuses to do so.

  The hundreds of presents must be displayed, the flowers arranged, the nerves calmed. Tense, uneasy, often strangely quiet, Virginia and Vanessa promise each other to remain calm and collected.

  In the absence of her father, the handsome Herbert, and to the indignation of Gerald and especially of George, the eldest, whose prerogative it is, Leslie does not think for a moment of not leading Stella to the altar himself. And he is right. For better or, more recently, for worse, hasn’t he been the pater familias of this blended family for almost twenty years?

  Virginia goes through those hours as though in a fog; recording them in her diary seems to her to verify the reality to which she submits, mechanically or sometimes with conviction, most often resigned. She threads her life through the days and begins to feel a growing interest in them, punctuated with bursts of pleasure or anger, but muted, whereas the blind obedience expected of young girls at that time remains a constant. Through those days, the diary begins to vibrate nevertheless, often with what she does not write but that trembles, however vague, below the surface.

  The house is no longer so much under the yoke of the past. Hyde Park Gate looks toward the future, busying itself with the classic preparations for a conventional Victorian wedding. Leslie is surprised at no longer being able to delay the union: “I could do perfectly well without Jack—Why should not she?”84 he writes to an old friend, Charles Norton. Unimpeachable logic!

  But the day comes. The moment arrives.

  Leslie appears with Stella on his arm, “very white and beautiful”; what he is feeling then, no one will ever know. She moves forward, she walks “in her sleep—her eyes fixed straight in front of her.” And what she is feeling—but this is true for every event in her life—will also remain unknown. It all seems to be a strange dream, a vision. “It was half a dream, or a nightmare. Stella was almost dreaming, I think; but probably hers was a happy one.” The evening before, she had lost an opal ring that Jack had given her.85

  The newlyweds depart for Italy. “Mr and Mrs Hills!”86 exclaims Virginia.

  The next day George Duckworth takes Gerald and the young Stephens to place the wedding flowers on their mother’s grave in the Hydegate cemetery.

  The first mention of Julia in her daughter’s diary.

  The newlyweds must return from Italy two weeks later, but Stella takes things in hand: to Leslie’s outrage and despair, she refuses to live with Jack at 22 Hyde Park Gate. They will live … at 24.

  Not for long.

  Not many lives were tortured and fretted and made numb with non-being as ours were then. That in shorthand, was the legacy of those two great unnecessary blunders; those two lashes of the random unheeding, unthinking flail that brutally and pointlessly killed the two people who should have made those years normal and natural, if not “happy.”87

  Virginia had behind her an entire body of work, fifty-eight years of life; she had six more months to live, and here we find her again, in 1940, in the midst of war, sounding this cry, repeating the same unanswerable question, from which she cannot get free.

  Forty-three years earlier, Stella had returned from her honeymoon ill. It was thought to be an intestinal flu. A nurse stayed with her. The nightmare began again, “everyone getting miserable. Everything as dismal as it well can be.”88 The whip was going to strike once more. Everyone feared or sensed it.

  Stella was in pain. Dr. Seton made some “frightening” remarks. More nurses were called. The sign of grave illness: straw spread in the street to lessen the noise of the car wheels and horses’ hooves. “No getting rid of the thought.” No mention of Julia’s death, which loomed. Virginia took refuge in her beloved “Macaulay, which is the only calm and un-anxious thing in this most agitating time.”89

  The next day, Stella improved, was no longer in pain. The doctor declared her out of danger. Until the end, Seton said he was “pleased,” “delighted,” “perfectly happy,” “still more satisfied,” “most cheerful,” and “very cheerful.” He would recommend eating ices for the peritonitis, avoiding cherries and chocolate. Stella was pregnant, he said.90

  Three months of fluctuations, of relapses and remissions: “Now that old cow is most ridiculously well & cheerful—hopping about out of bed etc,” ventured Virginia; once Stella came for lunch at 22 Hyde Park Gate and she and Virginia sat together in the park for a while, chatting as in the old days. “Mr. Henry James” met them; they ran into Leslie; the two men headed off together into the gardens. Stella could soon return to the London streets with Virginia; then the nurses returned, the doctor three times a day, the pain, the panic, the improvement; calm settled in from time to time, uneasiness remained.91

  Whether Stella was doing well or poorly, Virginia’s distress never left her, though she hid it, and her terror of the city and its traffic knew no bounds: “Hyde St even more diabolical than usual—the horses in a most wicked & rampant condition.” Accidents occurred one after another, which she kept watch for obsessively. The same month: “I managed to discover a man in the course of being squashed by an omnibus, but, as we were in the midst of Piccadilly Circus, the details of the accident could not be seen”; three days later she “had the pleasure of seeing a cart horse fall down.” There were nothing but mad horses escaping into the crowds, car collisions, an overturned hansom, a crushed cyclist—the surprise of being right about the danger of crossing the streets on foot and finding oneself at home, safe and sound. The daily carriage outings with Stella, convalescing from a bad bout, and Virginia daily gritting her teeth, in a panic.92

  Chaos on the streets, the chaos of those weeks. The pretense of leading a normal life, even a little festive: visits with friends, mad laughter, tears of hysterical laughter, concerts, boating, and ice cream orgies; at dinner, Gerald told funny stories,93 “indecent” ones, actually; other evenings, the guests listened with delight as Leslie recited Tennyson’s Maud or Macaulay’s The Armada. Nessa, wearing a gown by the famous Mrs. Young, made a magnificent entrance into society—and Stella in seventh heaven, playing the proud mother’s role, though from her bedroom. She takes three steps into the street, goes out in the park in a wheelchair, then relapses and remains bedridden, then improves and can be up in her dressing gown, improves some more, returns to an almost normal, slow-paced life, goes through a crisis, is in pain—perhaps from having eaten three cherries, pronounces Dr. Seton, who fails to understand the problem. Sometimes he claims to have prevented or impeded the development of peritonitis.

  No one acting. Everyone waiting.

  Volumes flowed through Virginia’s hands: Pepys in four volumes and all of dear Macaulay; Carlyle’s Cromwell in a matter of weeks, three volumes; the letters of William Cowper; a work by Leslie Stephen: Life of Henry Fawcett; Lady Burton’s memoir, two volumes; George Eliot’s Adam Bede; Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley; a History of Rome by Arnold, followed by one of England by Froude … twelve volumes! Books were “the greatest help and comfort.” Virginia raced through each work more quickly than the last, impatient to choose another recommended by an impressed, almost worried father—“’Ginia is devouring books, almost faster than I like.”94

  Stella was struggling, but who knew against what? Is it absurd to write this? Julia seemed to be lurking. As for Jack, he was sad, no question. Stella still played (she had to play) the role of protectress, responsible party. Leslie kept his distance, rediscovered his rightful pl
ace; he seems to have been indifferent to Stella’s illness. At her death, everyone would notice his detachment, Jack with indignation. The reaction of jealousy appeased? Dare we say of old passion avenged? Or perhaps, more than resigned: satiated?

  Virginia, however, spent her time at Stella’s house, would not leave her alone. We can sense her panic, silent, petrified. Her terror. In the midst of a suffocating heat wave. One cousin thought it “so bad for Stella to have Ginia always with her.” Another day, Virginia grumbles about “that old shop keeper Mrs Hills,” Jack’s mother, who turned her out of her daughter-in-law’s house after five minutes.95

  But Virginia came back, she returned every day; she clung, she hung on. The nightmare vaguely continued, without tragic moments, without remitting. The flail threatened. Ups and downs succeeded one another, and that disparity itself made the days around Stella all seem alike. Virginia does not say it, but knows them to be almost over.

  The whip would strike for the second time, and it was the memory of the first time that was on everyone’s mind for weeks, especially Virginia’s.

  Beginning July 10, the diary is abandoned, until July 27. Stella died on July 19. From memory, the adolescent filled in the gaps. And gradually the portrait of the dying Stella emerges … at Virginia’s bedside.

  His daughters would accuse Leslie of having worn out first Julia and then Stella, of having broken them, killed them under the weight of his demands and managerial tasks … surrounded by seven servants. We know that the truth with regard to Stella, or rather the trouble, had nothing to do with overwork.

  But for this whole agonizing time, it was Virginia who, racked with terror and repressed distress, plagued her half-sister, occupied the whole field, encroached upon Jack, required care, demanded the attention, solicitude, and last moments of the patient whose doctors and passive entourage let her die.