Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

by Viviane Forrester

  Henceforth, Virginia Woolf cuts a path through Virginia Stephen. One will soon come into being so that the other, shortly before dying, can write: “I feel in my fingers the weight of every word.”1

  Some of these words surfaced over the course of the crisis that followed her father’s death and that can be called madness … but not in the restrictive way Bell uses the term. Not to confirm the clichés.

  With Leslie dead, Virginia broke down. Guilt. Emptiness. Remorse. The already heavy years of loneliness. The futility of a life not yet begun. Of a deadening routine. Of energy that still hadn’t found its outlet.

  “My madness has saved me,”2 she would write, but that was not exactly true: rather, she saved it by attaining a reality that language was inadequate to express, which would make her fragile, keep her on the edge, and undo her three times. At twenty-two, beyond this new grief, the writer she was preparing to become, the person she already was, for whom the given everyday reality was not enough, threw her off balance.

  Attentive, anxious, solely responsible, she could tend a solid, too solid father, dying of intestinal cancer. Near him, with him. He remained calm as she followed the ups and downs of the illness, the operations and their aftermath. He was patient and stoic, and she could provide for him.

  With Leslie, it was the long good-bye that never ends: “There is nothing so abominable as saying goodbye in this world.” She admits her impatience for this slow, gentle, implacable end to come to an end: “I sometimes wish everything would happen directly, and be done with.” But it would go on; Leslie had unusual, “wonderful strength—terrible strength.” At Christmas, two months before the end, Virginia writes: “If only it could be quicker!” and for once she complains: “I know that death is what he wants, but oh Lord, it is hard.” And at Leslie’s death: “We have all been so happy together and there never was anybody so loveable.”3

  Virginia’s warm, comforting nature, later often masked, surfaced here for her father. A love as deep as it was ambivalent, endlessly resisted, disturbing. She would never stop struggling against him. Consider this strange exclamation, twenty-four years later: “Father’s birthday. He would have been 96, yes, today; & could have been 96, like other people one has known; but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books;—inconceivable.”4 Strange? Yes, because Leslie never stood in the way of the books or the writing, quite the opposite. Whereas dead, he became for her a springboard to death. We will see how his memory, when she dwelled on it, would become a catalyst for depression.

  Guilt at having suspected this father, invaded his privacy, witnessed his downfall, his unworthiness, his moment of shame; not so much having hated him and known him to be hateful.

  Nevertheless, with Leslie dead, the dark, coercive era of Hyde Park Gate comes to an end. The bright, sharp, exciting era of Bloomsbury is imminent: a time of emancipation and, in a few years, growth. But they still seem far away: Virginia’s brilliant friends, her reign among them, her sparkling presence, which would not prevent the doubts, the inner panic, the obstacles. Also far off: the incredibly organized restlessness, the varied professional life, the taste of worldly success, the haven at Rodmell with its gardens and, in London, the circle of so many lives surrounding hers. The occupation with writing, the books that follow one after another, her blossoming that will do nothing to avert her suffering.

  The eight years until her marriage, then until the publication of her first book, were certainly more free, but bitter, weighed down with loneliness. Closed out of the universities forbidden to women but available to Thoby and Adrian, she had already found studying alone to be a kind of solitary confinement.

  She would reproach that male-dominated society for having kept her out of schools that welcomed her brothers; she would be right, so very right. But in her particular case, didn’t the freedom of a more solitary, personal, truly more emancipated—even sovereign—course, however lonely and thankless, lead her to become the writer we know?

  Nevertheless we understand when she sighs: “I dont get anybody to argue with me now, and feel the want. I have to delve from books, painfully and all alone, what you get every evening sitting over your fire and smoking your pipe with Strachey etc. No wonder my knowledge is but scant. Theres nothing like talk as an educator I’m sure.”5 She is addressing Thoby here.

  She did not know that the whip would strike again … taking Thoby this time. He would never know his sister’s work.

  In the meantime, freed from all parental shackles, the young Stephens would scandalize their circle (soon to be left behind) by settling in the Bloomsbury district, considered disreputable. Or worse: inelegant. Bloomsbury, which would suddenly come to life, thanks to Thoby and his Cambridge friends.

  But first, a serious setback: Virginia’s breakdown. As Vanessa finds, organizes, and decorates their new residence, 46 Gordon Square, her sister, at the end of her strength, loses her grip, crushed by the successive deaths, the troubling corpses and troubled lives. By the morbid distortions of grieving. Since the age of thirteen—for the past nine years—she has stoically witnessed her losses, because one isn’t supposed to cry or get upset, but press forward impassively, never yielding to affliction. “Life goes on”: that is the cool, composed British response, so foreign to Leslie Stephen. All her life, Virginia would display energy, a will to endure, to live, to survive, and above all, not to be isolated, to participate with others, to be part of the group…. And to carry on alone.

  But this time, Virginia yields to her life, as she experiences it, to which she returns and with which she is in accord. She reacts to her life by letting her tragic excesses vanquish her, rather than forever yielding to the demands of social etiquette. She stops resisting her life, even if it is hopeless to the point of insanity; she lets it run its course, allows it to think, to speak for her.

  And, because it is already so late, too late, because the delay has been too long and too filled with emotions too long repressed, with too much pain too long censored, she can only respond by overstepping the “norm.” She is twenty-two years old and goes through the mirror. A forced entry is opened for her into other regions, different logics, languages uttered another way. A kind of freedom, but suspect, perilous.

  She yields (or rebels) three months after Leslie’s death, following a trip, initiated by Gerald, that the Stephens and the Duckworths take to Venice, where Virginia discovers “a place to die in beautifully: but to live [in] I never felt more depressed”; “Geralds figure never did make part of the Venetian foreground I have in my mind!” Upon their return, in the Hyde Park Gate room that she must soon vacate, she hears horrible voices and furious, infernal, intolerable regions open, which engulf Virginia, but whose harrowing sadness, whose reality she absorbs and will restore intact, rehabilitate, or nearly, through Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway.6

  Septimus, who goes through what Virginia Stephen went through, hears what she heard, which Virginia Woolf reproduces, exposes through his voice: the pathos of having to experience simultaneously two orders of truth that contradict each other and that mutually impose upon and condemn each other, that superimpose or annihilate each other, freed of all logic, space dilated, life in the raw; the words scathing, endowed with pain and especially with forbidden exactitude.

  Septimus Warren Smith’s suffering, directly transcribed by one in the grip of it, testifies to the respect that is owed to them both, and indicates the crime that threatens them both, and that will destroy him.

  Septimus, impaled on the fact of believing he feels nothing when too much feeling ravages him.

  The cries of suffering because one has not suffered.

  Feeling nothing is what Virginia felt so strongly before the dead Julia, when, led to her bedside, a desire to laugh had seized her and she had said to herself, as she has “often done at moments of crisis since, ‘I feel nothing whatever.’”7 On the anniversary of that death, forty-two years later, she again recit
es that incapacity to feel anything. The very thing that makes her and Septimus blazing torches of emotion.

  In 1940, when she returns to the image of the whip with regard to Stella’s death in what would become Moments of Being, does Virginia Woolf recall having already written and published that same sentence in 1927 in Mrs. Dalloway? “The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?”8 She is referring to Septimus Warren Smith and his wife, Rezia, the little Italian milliner, in exile, so alone and lost in London, whose author, Mrs. Woolf, so wrenchingly understood. But had Virginia ever left Septimus, and had he ever left her?

  Had he already been born when Virginia, taking refuge at her friend Violet Dickinson’s home after Leslie’s death, attended by three nurses, heard the birds in the garden speaking Greek and King Edward speaking obscenities below her window, among the azaleas?

  The birds were because of Thoby, who was passionate about them and studied them, drew them. A long time later at Manorbier, Thoby now dead, Virginia: “I have been thinking of Thoby all the time here; I suppose it is the birds.”9 And if they spoke Greek, that was because of Thoby too, who had introduced the Greek language and literature to his sister, who would discuss it with her for hours.

  With the birds, all of nature, the whole environment, speaks, giving orders to Septimus Warren Smith. Let us hear what Virginia heard and what Septimus suffers sitting in Regent’s Park, where, without Rezia, talking to himself, he asks to whom truth, the meaning of the world is entrusted: “‘To whom?’ he asked aloud. ‘To the Prime Minister,’ the voices which rustled above his head replied. The supreme secret must be told to the Cabinet; first, that trees are alive; next, there is no crime; next, love, universal love, he muttered, gasping, trembling.”10

  No crime; love; he repeated, fumbling for his card and pencil, when a Skye terrier snuffed his trousers and he started in an agony of fear. It was turning into a man! He could not watch it happen! It was horrible, terrible to see a dog become a man! At once the dog trotted away…. The trees waved, brandished. Welcome, the world seemed to say. Men must not cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted such revelations on the backs of envelopes.) Change the world. No one kills from hatred. Make it known (he wrote it down). He waited. He listened. A sparrow perched on the railing opposite chirped Septimus, Septimus, four or five times over and went on, drawing its notes out, to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words how there is no crime and, joined by another sparrow, they sang in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death.11

  The hallucination is less of a torment than guarded contact with another reality, with his earlier fate that, uncompromising, pursues itself, destroys itself; with Rezia’s pain; and also always with life’s delights and memory’s anguish, memories of World War I resisted in vain, and of Evans, his officer, with whom he was in love without knowing it and who is dead, killed right in front of him in the trenches, although Septimus felt nothing, has felt nothing since. “There was no excuse; nothing whatever the matter, except the sin for which human nature had condemned him to death; that he did not feel. He had not cared when Evans was killed; that was worst; but all the other crimes raised their heads.”12

  And, as Septimus begins to sing in Regent’s Park, he hears Evans answer him and sing in turn “among the orchids,” as he hears Rezia say to him: “But I am so unhappy Septimus,” since a little earlier he announced to her: ‘“Now we will kill ourselves,” while he is “standing by the river … with a look which she had seen in his eyes when a train went by, or an omnibus—a look as if something fascinated him.”13

  Virginia Woolf’s artistry lies in having the couple cross paths with Peter Walsh, Clarissa’s old lover returned from India, who will encounter them again, but who, melancholy at seeing them arguing, says to himself: “being young.”14

  And it is Clarissa who, uneasy within her tranquility, thinks for no reason: “What horror!” with regard to her disappointed life, while a nameless horror surrounds Septimus and Rezia Warren Smith, who soon will know how “once you fall….”15

  Virginia goes through her crisis period at Violet Dickinson’s long before Septimus’s name is ever written, but like Septimus, she throws herself out a window—though her window is located close to the ground, so she comes to no great harm.

  Violet, to whom Virginia turns for refuge, would play that role in their correspondence, already spanning several years. “My food is affection!” Virginia implores her. Violet, much older than Virginia, unmarried, was immensely tall and phenomenally aristocratic; she was a snob, socially prominent, very conventional, but quite intelligent and won over by the younger woman, having sensed Virginia’s talent and merit early on. Vanessa to Virginia, who was then twenty-two: “I went to see Violet this afternoon…. She thought you would undoubtably be a great writer one day…. Is that enough for you? She really thinks you are a genius.”16

  It is as a lost child that Virginia confides in Violet, but it is also as a future writer when, at twenty, she gives her the synopsis of a play she plans to write (with Jack Hills!) which already parallels the actual work:

  Im going to have a man and a woman—show them growing up—never meeting—not knowing each other—but all the time you’ll feel them come nearer and nearer. This will be the real exciting part (as you see)—but when they almost meet—only a door between—you see how they just miss—and go off at a tangent, and never come anywhere near again. There’ll be oceans of talk and emotions without end. Im sure all this interests you so much!17

  She nestles close to her friend, nestles mentally through her letters, but physically as well. Physically attracted? Violet is surely attracted to her, and Virginia: “It is astonishing what depths—hot volcano depths—your finger has stirred in Sparroy—hitherto entirely quiescent.”18

  “Sparroy” (derived from “sparrow”) is the painfully regressive nickname Virginia gives herself, desperately seeking someone in whom to confide, no longer evasive, finding (instead of losing) someone, for once. Hence the abundant sentimental chatter of Sparroy, the sparrow. But also of a wallaby, when it is not a kangaroo: “Would you like to feel the Wallaby snout on your bosom?” “Who thinks of him now, or licks under his fur?” Or, “I wish you were a Kangaroo and had a pouch for small Kangaroos to creep to,” and other affectations.19

  But Violet Dickinson is a bastion of support. After spending two months with her, Virginia emerges still shaken, so that she can’t place the voices she no longer hears and writes to Violet: “You will be glad to hear that your Sparroy feels herself a recovered bird…. All the voices I used to hear telling me to do all kinds of wild things have gone—and Nessa says they were always only my imagination.”20

  Yes, it could be called madness. But what will it be called? That is the question.

  Two more very calm, very boring months in Cambridge with a very pious, intellectual Quaker aunt (Leslie’s sister). The crisis has passed, end of parenthesis.

  Then, suddenly, freedom. Hyde Park Gate is already consigned to memory. The curtain opens for Virginia and Vanessa at 46 Gordon Square, in that improper neighborhood of Bloomsbury, the symbol of their emancipation. On their way to becoming Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.

  The edge of the woods is in sight. Salvation. Surrounded by Adrian and Thoby, the two sisters emerge autonomous; they have found other outlets in a time when, for young women like them, the only path available was marriage. Here we have a painter, a writer, two women with open futures; two sisters bound since childhood in a “very close conspiracy.”21 A way presents itself, unthinkable until now for the daughters of an antisuffragette Julia Stephen. They can be considered saved, liberated, not from life, not from suffering, nor even from frustration, but from an insipid and deadening future.

  A friend of Violet introduces Virginia to the Guardian, and she becomes one of its literary critics. Almost immediately she starts writing for The Academy, The National Review, and most impor
tantly, weekly, for The Times Literary Supplement, the holy of holies! She also volunteers at Morley College, teaching history and literature to impoverished girls. The days take shape.

  But above all, youth forges ahead at Gordon Square. Gaiety. Thoby invites home his friends, those Virginia envies him.

  Like Vanessa, Virginia is exceptionally beautiful, a beauty resembling her sister’s, moving and singular, but which she always seems to forget or not to recognize, and that plays no role in her new dealings with young men who share her passion for art and thought. At first she remains shy and reticent among the young Cambridge men Thoby brings home (that’s when Leonard comes to dinner at “the Goth’s” before leaving for Ceylon).

  Soon they would gather every Thursday evening at the Stephens’, and gradually Virginia Stephen begins to resemble the brilliant, formidable Virginia who becomes Virginia Woolf. She is still rarely heard but already listened to on those lively and serious, almost ascetic evenings: cocoa and whisky, buns and biscuits are served. There is talk and talk and more talk. And quiet moments too. Above all, there are no taboos anymore … at least not in conversation. There is the famous: “Semen?”22 uttered by Lytton Strachey, pointing at a spot on Vanessa’s dress. And everyone in hysterics, even decades later. Good-bye Edward! Good-bye Victoria!

  Life lies ahead, all of it. But the whip is going to strike.

  1906, a journey. Adrian and Thoby are traveling on horseback across Albania and Greece, where Virginia and Vanessa are meeting them, accompanied by Violet. Thoby returns to London; the others follow as far as Constantinople, where Vanessa falls ill. They return to England on the Orient Express. In London, Thoby is confined to bed. Vanessa, still sick, takes to her bed as well. At her home, Violet also falls seriously ill.