Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

by Viviane Forrester

  Everything was going wrong. Jack was suffering from an abscessed leg. Gerald had fallen ill. Stella arranged for their care. On July 11, it was Virginia’s turn to feel sick with rheumatism, and to seek out Stella who, stretched out on a sofa, was taking tea with Jack close by in a “big chair.” Virginia sat at their feet, and Jack soon left the room. “We talked together,” Virginia writes contentedly. The next day, she managed to impose upon them for the entire day: Stella would not let her leave, the rheumatism was too painful. Thanks to which, she took Jack’s place in the “big chair.”96

  She was simply regressing, like a weak, plaintive, defeated child. And dependent, demanding. Desperate.

  July 14: at Stella’s house, she declares herself worse, with a mild fever, and achieves her goal: Dr. Seton sends her to bed … at the Hills’, in Jack’s dressing room, across from their bedroom. And Stella sits with her for a long time. The next day, after refusing to see her in the morning, Stella spends the afternoon with her, brings her tea … before going to prepare tea for Leslie, next door at 22! At the end of the day, Virginia suffers from “the fidgets,” nervous agitation, and Stella rubs her forehead until she calms down … till eleven o’clock at night.

  The next morning: “She came in to me before breakfast in her dressing gown to see how I was. She only stayed a moment, but then she was quite well. She left me, & I never saw her again.”97

  Stella takes a turn for the worse and is in pain. No one tells Virginia, to whom Stella often calls through the open doors to ask how she is doing. July 17: Virginia is sent home by a doctor, in the arms of George, wrapped in Stella’s fur coat, and as they passes her room, Stella calls good-bye to her. July 18: an operation is scheduled for that evening. July 19 at 3 a.m.: George and Nessa come to announce to Virginia that Stella Hills is dead.

  No one in the family attends the burial. Five days later, Jack takes Virginia and Nessa to the tomb, beside Julia’s, “near you as you go in.”98

  We have nothing to add.

  Leslie would be next on the list of the dead. Seven years later, intestinal cancer. Virginia would care for him day after day, for two years. She would often be eager for the end to come, and with his death, the waiting was over. Guaranteed remorse! That would haunt her for the rest of her life.

  Vanessa continued to detest their father and kept her distance.

  Since we have already confronted the question of incest between Leslie Stephen and his stepdaughter, Stella Duckworth, hardly detected until now, it is time to consider the Duckworth brothers, George and Gerald, whose incestuous misdeeds are much better known. They are both considered, George in particular (the two sisters saw to that), to have ruined Virginia’s life.

  Virginia would hardly mention the horrible manual exploration of her “private parts”99 by Gerald, when he was seventeen and she was five years old, and her sharp awareness of the shame and the seriousness of the offense. But at fifty-nine years old, she would tremble with shame again, three months before her death, at the memory of that violation, which she had almost left unrecorded.

  George, on the other hand, would become the target for the two sisters, delighted to divulge his infamy throughout Bloomsbury. Virginia would devote a bitter, hilarious session of the Memoir Club to him. Together Vanessa and Virginia took great pleasure in ridiculing him when their paths crossed (less and less often) as he aged, gracelessly, according to them, increasingly trapped in his conventional shell and his self-importance, whereas they would free themselves from whatever or whomever resembled him.

  George’s misdeeds? Unconscious hypocrisy regarding limits. Familiarity, affectionate gestures deviating toward more amorous ones, leading to sensual bordering on sexual relations. He made demonstrative public displays, infuriating Vanessa by “whispering encouragement, lavishing embraces which were not entirely concealed from the eyes of strangers.”100

  Their senior by fourteen and twelve years, he used his prestige, his charm, and Julia’s memory (who would have encouraged him to fulfill his role as brother and “launch” the two young women into society) to persuade them in turn to accompany him to those London dinners and elegant dances he adored. He dragged Vanessa to them and when she had had enough, he took Virginia. Trophies. Each exceptionally beautiful, but Virginia more timid, still shy and reticent. In the end, she decided they were failures, as she wrote to Emma Vaughan of the 1901 London Season: “Really, we can’t shine in Society. I don’t know how it’s done. We aint popular—we sit in corners and look like mutes who are longing for a funeral.”101

  The eldest Duckworth must have often been dismayed, as, for instance, when Virginia, gripped with remorse, finally decided to “shine” and chose to address the Victorian elite on Plato over the course of a grand dinner. The agonized George would remind her on the way home of what young women were customarily allowed to say: nothing.

  But here it is, described twenty years later for the Memoir Club, the younger sister coming home from a dance with this older brother so universally admired for his brotherly protection of the two motherless girls. Here he is entering Virginia’s bedroom, where Virginia is already in bed: “‘Don’t be frightened,’ George whispered, ‘And don’t turn on the light, oh beloved. Beloved—,’ and he flung himself on my bed and took me in his arms.”102

  “Yes, the old ladies of Kensington and Belgravia never knew that George Duckworth was not only father and mother, brother and sister to those poor Stephen girls; he was their lover also,”103 Virginia declares at the end of the meeting, with a sense of her secret effect. But we may doubt that things went so far as her accusation implies.

  Or else, why would Vanessa, at twenty years old, travel and stay with George in Paris, and delight in his discoveries, the painters’ studios, the museums she visits? Virginia writes to her “dear old Bar,” one of George’s (or Georgie’s) nicknames, that “Nessa’s letters are frantic with excitement.” When Vanessa returns, her sister thanks him again: she “seems quite intoxicated with all the things she has done and seen … she says she felt like a child, and enjoyed everything like a child…. I had no idea that she would enjoy it all so much. You must have managed everything with the utmost skill and care and I am most grateful to you.” To the point that we will find Vanessa traveling with George again two years later for three weeks, to Rome this time, and then to Florence.104

  Even when the young Stephens were still children, George dreamed up all sorts of small festivities like ice cream feasts, boating, walks in London, riding lessons. In another vein, we have seen him taking them to the cemetery.

  He loved to be generous. If the Stephens were comfortable, the Duckworths were very well off, and under the same roof they maintained different lifestyles. George was prodigious with gifts. For Vanessa, for example: an Arabian horse; an opal necklace; amethysts; gowns from famous dressmakers, in particular, a certain Mrs. Young; fans; jewelry for her hair; travel … and so on! The manuscript of A Sketch of the Past contains a crossed-out sentence: “He paid for clothes; he bought enamel brooches; to the public he represented the good brother; doing his duty by motherless girls.” And if the young girls rebelled, George appealed to his female admirers, who defended him indignantly: “How could we resist his wishes? Was not George Duckworth wonderful? And anyhow what else did we want?”105

  And as for George?

  George, who claimed (Jack Hills quotes him) to be a virgin until his marriage, at thirty-six years old, to Lady Margaret Herbert (look! his father’s first name).

  A note: Virginia would describe her moment of sensual delight as a young girl slipping out of her ball gown, letting it slide the length of her naked body upon returning home one evening. And that memory resembles the scene in which she undresses after the dance the night that George bursts into her room.

  But about this George who so resembles his father, the marvelous Herbert, about whom Virginia, like her mother, seems to have once dreamed. In the Mausoleum Book, Leslie draws a (generous) portrait of his posthumous rival a
nd addresses Herbert’s son: “I vividly remember his smile, for I often see it on the face of his son George. I might have spared any attempt at description by saying to you, my dear George, and to your brothers and sisters, that you are strikingly like your father.” (But Leslie cannot resist adding: “I think that he was a little heavier of build and slower of mind.”)106

  Whatever the facts may be, George left a harmful, not to say disastrous (but especially ridiculous) mark in the memories of Virginia corroborated by Vanessa. And that is what matters here, but it does not render completely repellent (unlike his brother Gerald) this Duckworth of very average intelligence, the most conventional mind, who was no doubt himself lost in the uneasy maelstrom of his strangely blended family and his own griefs, the weight of which he had not the means to measure. He seems to have hoped to become his family’s benefactor, consoling and restoring his own, as Julia, his mother, had loved doing elsewhere, among others. And like her, he hoped to be recognized in this gratifying role. But his bursts of enthusiasm went awry and came to exceed the good ends he had in mind, when he confused erotic desire with family ties and, thus absolved, gave way to his impulses. His desires.

  A situation not entirely unfamiliar to Virginia, no doubt. Which explains the remorse that sharpens the uneasiness.

  Virginia conveys (and transmits) this uneasiness to Janet Case, her Greek teacher, who has become a friend. This scene takes place in 1911, as related to Vanessa. Janet and her old student have been talking for hours, and Virginia discovers that Janet, elderly, unmarried, “has a calm interest in copulation,” a term that Virginia adores using. Whereupon they take up

  the revelation of all Georges malefactions. To my surprise, she has always had an intense dislike of him; and used to say “Whew—you nasty creature,” when he came in and began fondling me over my Greek. When I got to the bedroom scenes, she dropped her lace, and gasped like a benevolent gudgeon. By bedtime she said she was feeling quite sick, and did go to the W.C., which, needless to say, had no water in it.107

  George? Virginia never tired of denouncing him, as she did eleven years later to Elena Richmond, “that gigantic mass of purity,” whose husband ran the Times Literary Supplement and who admitted to her: “I am going to be perfectly frank about your brother—your half brother—and say that I have never liked him. Nor has Bruce [Richmond, Elena’s husband].” Henceforth the Richmonds would have a thousand reasons to like him even less. And Virginia, delighted, to Vanessa: “Dont you think this is a noble work for our old age—to let the light in upon the Duckworths—and I daresay George will be driven to shoot himself one day when he’s shooting rabbits.”108

  The Duckworths … Duck, and that word or that creature punctuated Virginia’s life in a significant way. Two examples among many others: at seventeen, she works on a story with revealing content, published posthumously as “A Terrible Tragedy in the Duck Pond”; and she vomits for the first time in her life when Leonard forces her to “eat an entire cold duck.”109

  The “Terrible Tragedy” recounts at great length, in a parodic and pontificating style, the triple drowning of Adrian and Virginia Stephen and a friend in the pond covered with a “carpet of duckweed,” “the green shroud alas of three young lives”: “The angry waters of the duck pond rose in their wrath to swallow their prey—& the green caverns of the depths opened—& closed…. Alone, untended, unsoothed, with no spectator but the silver moon, with no eye to weep, no hand to caress, three young souls were whelmed by the waters of the duck Pond.” Then follows a “Note of Correction & Addition to the above by one of the Drowned”: “The corpses, however, emerged from their watery grave, & the corpse who writes this note can testify that her first impulse when she reached the shore was to sink upon its muddy bosom.”110

  There is humor here, but also a fatal submersion, no doubt long imagined, in that angry water, the domain of ducks and covered by duckweed: “I sank & sank & sank, the water creeping into ears mouth & nose, till I felt it close over my head. This, methinks, is drowning, I said to myself. It seemed an age passed under water.” And it is the struggle between the desire to live or die, and finally, salvation, but “hair & body covered with innumerable bits of duckweed.” One of the first signs (not the first) of an obsession with water, a fascination for drowning. One of the first steps toward the River Ouse. Here, the pond of the Duck(worth)s.111

  The Duckworths and Stephens would part ways after Leslie’s death, encountering one another less and less. Still, Gerald would be Virginia’s first editor, and George would lend the Woolfs his luxurious country house during one of Virginia’s convalescences. A strange choice for Leonard, aware of the past.

  Despite that past, or because it existed and was also shared by their mother and Stella, as well as Thoby, and their father, a faint complicity would remain between George and the two sisters, based on shared memories and griefs. One day in 1930, when Virginia was working on a caricature of the aging George, now Sir George, more pompous and self-satisfied than ever, she concluded pensively, “Still some sentiment begins to form misty between us. He speaks of ‘Mother’. I daresay finds in me some shadowy likeness—well—& then he is not now in a position to do me harm. His conventions amuse me…. He preserves a grain or two of what is me—my unknown past; my self; so that if George died, I should feel something of myself buried.”112

  When he died, four years later, the Woolfs were vacationing in Kerry and read the announcement in the Times only later, and Virginia asked Nessa: “Did you go to the funeral? I’ve just with great labour composed a letter to Margaret [his widow]. Now suppose this had happened 30 years ago, it would have seemed odd to take it so calmly…. I hope to goodness somebody went to the service—I wish I had been able to.” Three days earlier in the diary, she described the childhood that was disappearing with him, “the batting, the laughter, the treats, the presents, taking us for bus rides to see famous churches, giving us tea at City Inns, & so on—”113

  Afterward, she would not hesitate to vilify him as before, but for the moment he was once again the George she had described when, at twenty-seven, she had decided to record Vanessa’s childhood for her newborn nephew Julian Bell: “He had been once, when we were children, a hero to us; strong and handsome and just; he taught us to hold our bats straight and to tell the truth, and we blushed with delight if he praised.”114

  She describes him as “a stupid, good natured young man, of profuse, voluble affections,” but whose characteristics had nothing simple about them, “modified, confused, distorted, exalted, set swimming in a sea of racing emotions until you were completely at a loss to know where you stood … [he] proved more and more incapable of containing them … profoundly believing in the purity of his love, he behaved little better than a brute.” He alternately elicited confidence and suspicion, spent vacations with the family, took his stepfather on walks, listened to and worried about Vanessa’s problems, arranged “little plans for our amusement.”115

  Nonetheless, in the eyes of their half-sisters, George and Gerald would share the role of the more or less unconscious perverts who ravaged Virginia’s life.

  A question: what about Laura? What about the child, then the young girl, completely defenseless, a half-sister as well, introduced at eight years old—the same age as Gerald—into the Duckworths’ world? What about Laura Stephen at Hyde Park Gate, the Great Lady of the Lake, Leslie’s “backward” daughter, the completely vulnerable Laura, at the mercy of all eventualities?

  Is there some reason for recalling here the single, recurrent intelligible sentence of the institutionalized Laura: “I told him to go away”?116 Not in reference to George, the more sophisticated one, attracted by the beauty of his almost sisters turned young women, and who seems to have made his incestuous advances in a sentimental mood, no doubt less extreme, perhaps less repulsed than Virginia proclaimed. But what of Gerald, capable at seventeen of obscenely fondling a little girl of five: Virginia?

  Whereas Virginia makes George her primary t
arget. But did he really ruin her life?

  She went on at such length about all his deeds and misdeeds, spoke so much of them, told them so often, commented on them, she avenged herself so thoroughly, mocked him, denounced him, endlessly accused him, ridiculed him with Vanessa, vilified him in public and “aloud,”117 so that what had happened must have been largely exorcised; it had not been repressed, in any case, and those memories, whatever their degree of accuracy, were not ruined over time; were not deceitfully undermined.

  These too seem rather to have served as memory screens, for what it was “impossible to say aloud”118 and what was not clearly conveyed: the ambiguities, the thick atmosphere of Hyde Park Gate, its libidinous secrets, its sexual and virtual, mawkish gibberish between generations, and especially the discovered shame of a father. Of a father in all his states. And then the death of Stella, for which no one could be accused, without turning to the supernatural. And nevertheless Julia and her hold, haunting them beyond the grave, and nevertheless Leslie….

  So many thoughts, so many words that remained forbidden, so many emotions closed to analysis, even to enunciation: “impossible” to give voice to. Even the voice of one who knows how to talk so well!

  To talk. But to speak? Speaking is another matter.

  Which could explain the still mysterious last line of the last page of the last book Virginia wrote. The announcement, which she will not survive, of an imminent transgression, of a liberation about to occur: the announcement of a voice finally about emerge, but in tandem and in the night and within a silence that it will not interrupt:

  “Then the curtain rose. They spoke.”119

  Part 3

  1904. Leslie Stephen is dead. Virginia has watched over him for more than two years. Vanessa, having firmly and definitively rejected her father, has kept her distance. Hyde Park Gate is over. The Stephens and the Duckworths look for new addresses, they go their separate ways. The Stephens consider Bloomsbury, an unusual neighborhood.