Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

by Viviane Forrester

  The beginning of a new nightmare that the stoic, competent Virginia faces alone.

  Surrounded by nurses, Thoby is in dire straits; the doctors’ visits begin again, as useless as with Stella. Until the end, the doctors say they are “satisfied”; according to them, the young man’s horrible pains don’t come from cherries, as in Stella’s case, but from an “irritation caused by” eating too many grapes with seeds! The “irritation” becomes a perforation.23

  Three weeks of torment for Virginia at her sister’s side (who suffers from appendicitis, according to the doctors) and at the bedside of her brother—before Thoby dies from typhoid fever the doctors have misdiagnosed as malaria. He is twenty-six years old.

  Thoby!

  His presence, henceforth based on his absence, would never leave Virginia. His memory would serve as catalyst for The Waves, and twenty-five years later:

  I must record, heaven be praised, the end of The Waves. I wrote the words O Death fifteen minutes ago, having reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity & intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice, or almost, after some sort of speaker (as when I was mad). I was almost afraid, remembering the voices that used to fly ahead. Anyhow it is done; & I have been sitting these 15 minutes in a state of glory, & calm, & some tears, thinking of Thoby & if I could write Julian Thoby Stephen 1881–1906 on the first page. I suppose not.24

  Thoby, the fourth loss—and what losses—suffered by Virginia since the age of thirteen; she is now twenty-four. And this time, after having already experienced the depths of despair, having already hit bottom, she seems to have acquired a rare mastery, allowing her to accomplish a touching feat: she continues to provide Violet (seriously stricken with typhoid herself) with news of Thoby as if he were alive.

  For a month, twenty long letters full of news. Detailed, varied, plausible accounts that she invents each day regarding her dead brother, combining her skills as a writer (who would not publish a book for another seven years) with her innate gifts for friendship and tenderness, often masked henceforth by irony, even fierceness, which didn’t prevent her from otherwise demonstrating compassion and fidelity toward her beloved victims.

  Twenty letters to relate Thoby’s struggle to regain his strength, his fluctuating temperature, his quarrels with the nurses, his long-awaited, slow convalescence. He is allowed to have chicken broth, then minced chicken, then chocolate. He is drawing birds.

  Sometimes, a stifled cry: “My Violet, if only the British public would not celebrate their makers praise—or if only their maker would provide adequate voices, and Broadwood pianos. O God! how I suffer.” Sometimes the news of Thoby turns macabre: “Dear old Thoby is still on his back,” “Thoby slept better. He still isn’t allowed to move.” “He is not to eat anything solid yet, and he is not to sit up … he cant write much, and he dont get letters”; on the other hand, he receives “a great many flowers,” though destined for his tomb.25

  Maybe by prolonging it in this way, she was better able to endure the horror of his death; somewhere in the world, on paper, for the time of the writing and in the mind of Violet, Thoby was still a living subject.

  We must not forget Virginia’s immense powers of dissembling. Just a few months before Leslie’s imminent death: “We are really the cheerfullest family in Kensington.” Later: “I am the happiest woman in England,” she will often insist … often to persuade herself of it.26

  Violet would discover the truth a month later, in an article on the Leslie Stephen biography by Frederic Maitland, which mentions that it was published “almost on the very day of the untimely death of Sir Leslie Stephen’s eldest son, Mr Thoby Stephen.” And it is Virginia who consoles Violet: “You must think that Nessa is radiantly happy.”27

  Because she is. Beaming, a rose in her hair, overflowing with joy, engaged to Clive Bell two days after Thoby’s death. When she passes her sister’s room, Virginia hears the laughter of the engaged couple. The “very close conspiracy”28 is no longer between the two sisters. Virginia feels excluded. Deserted!

  Another exclusion: Clive and Vanessa want to continue to live at 46 Gordon Square once they are married. Virginia and Adrian must find another place, less grand, to live. She feels “elderly and prosaic.” To Violet, who believes ardently in God, she remarks that “he has a heavy hand.”29

  Thoby is dead, Vanessa growing distant. Yes, many desertions.

  Nessa’s cruelty? Virginia says nothing about it. Or almost nothing. She does not waver, she moves on. As she always does. The last step will be into the River Ouse.

  When the engagement becomes official, Virginia’s friend Madge Vaughan asks her what she thinks of it. Virginia doesn’t know how to answer: she doesn’t “think very much yet” and says only that Clive seems “clever, and cultivated—more taste, I think, than genius; but he has a gift for making other people shine, and he is very affectionate.” But to Violet: “When I think of father and Thoby and then see that funny little creature twitching his pink skin and jerking out his little spasm of laughter I wonder what odd freak there is in Nessa’s eyesight…. But I dont say this, and I wont say it, except to you.” “It will really be some time before I can separate him from her.” From one letter to the next, she changes, stumbles. Nessa is “tawny and jubilant and lusty as a young God. I never saw her look better.” She is delighted, but “I did not see Nessa alone, but I realise that that is all over, and I shall never see her alone any more; and Clive is a new part of her, which I must learn to accept.” Her way of accepting Clive would come as a surprise.30

  The wedding took place in February, less than three months after Thoby’s death. Let us remember Leonard in Ceylon, reacting with incredulity, jealous of Clive. To Madge, Virginia admitted her confusion after the ceremony: “It is very strange to watch—or rather not to watch—It does seem all a dream still…. Adrian and I try to get a house, and I hope I have found one now in Fitzroy Square—but they always fall through at the last…. Thoby used to say that you were the most beautiful person he had ever seen…. It is very hard not to have him here—I cant get reconciled—but we have to go on. Adrian is well—but I cant be a brother to him!”31

  “Poor little boy,” she had already called her younger brother when Leslie died. Adrian was now twenty-one, but would always be the twelve-year-old deposed by Julia’s death. “He was a deprived child,” Virginia would admit. He would never be happy, and she would grow away from him, fleeing the memories of their unrewarding cohabitation and Adrian’s sarcasm, the brother always on the defensive, the sister so vulnerable and easily dominated. Later, their encounters brought back to her “the old despair; the crouching servile feeling which is my lowest & worst; … & the old futile comparisons between his respect for Nessa & his disrespect for me.” Despite a few intermittent efforts, she would never like Adrian’s wife, Karin, whom Leonard would detest, just as he wouldn’t warm to their two daughters, whom Virginia would have loved to love.32

  Adrian’s scars? They were old ones: he was Julia’s “joy,” her pet, and so excluded by the others, before being fixed for good in his isolation after their mother’s death. A child thrown off course, forever at bay and solitary, supported only by Stella, who disappeared. Leslie, who championed Thoby, shows little interest in his youngest son. The charismatic older brother occupies the whole space, everyone’s heart.

  Long after Adrian’s death, his daughter Ann was certainly conveying her father’s bitterness but also the old, implicit general impression, when she said with regard to Thoby’s early demise that “the wrong man died.”33

  Adrian Stephen would become James Ramsay, the little boy in To the Lighthouse who cannot wait to go there, who is always dreaming of it. Here Virginia finds a way to commiserate with Adrian. She enters into the impotent rage of James, who has also lost his mother, and who, throughout the brief, overwhelming crossing to the lighthouse, is haunted by the desire to put a knife through his father’s heart … while the widowed Mr. Ramsay dr
ones: “We perish, each alone,” or “I beneath a rougher sea.”34

  First trace of the forbidden beacon: an issue of Hyde Park Gate News, September 9, 1892; Adrian is nine years old: “Saturday morning Master Hilary Hunt and Master Basil Smith came up to Talland House and asked Master Thoby and Miss Virginia to accompany them to the light-house as Freeman the boatman said that there was a perfect tide and wind for going there. Master Adrian Stephen was much disappointed at not being allowed to go.”35

  Whatever his age or circumstances, Adrian’s blue eyes would be noted for being large, opened, astonished. He would remain the twelve-year-old child, receptive and disappointed, who, thanks to his mother, for whom he was everything, was always waiting for everything, and who found himself isolated, facing nothing, upon her death. Even in his sister’s memoirs or his father’s Mausoleum Book, he is almost absent. He would remain thoughtful, bitter, suspicious, measured, intelligent, slow, passive, athletic, completely depressed or completely vibrant depending on his breakdowns, captivated by so many things, and increasingly enclosed within an ever threatened indifference.

  He would lead an independent, fascinating, dreary life; he would have a passionate lover, the inescapable Duncan Grant, with the inevitable Maynard Keynes always at his side; next, a fascinating wife, intellectual, dynamic, friend of philosophers, deaf, graceless, with whom life would be exciting, chaotic, and sad. His profession, serious and absorbing, would distance him even further from the Bloomsbury circle, who already did not accept him: he and Karin became very eminent psychoanalysts; she the author of sensitive, profound essays published by the Hogarth Press. They lived a secluded life, even as they threw parties attended and enjoyed by all of Bloomsbury. A leftist, Adrian was more or less absentmindedly anti-Semitic like many of his crowd, but he would fight against anti-Semitism at the end of World War II.

  An event: during the period when he and Virginia shared various residences in London, the superb, renowned Dreadnought farce, organized by Adrian. The visit of the Abyssinian emperor with his attendants was announced on the Royal English Marines ship, the Dreadnought. Admiral May and Commander Fisher (a cousin of the Stephens), the officers, and the entire crew (in new white gloves purchased for the occasion) solemnly received the imperial party. The visitors cut fine figures in Oriental dress; they had their own interpreter and spoke a funny language … invented by them, vaguely resembling Swahili, with the recurrent expression “bunga-bunga.” It was Adrian, Virginia (wearing a beard), Duncan Grant, and a few friends in disguise, faces darkened with shoe polish, who majestically accepted the tributes and speeches; they refused the gun salute and accepted apologies: a score for the Abyssinian national anthem was sought in vain and the Zanzibar national anthem was played as a substitute. The escapade ended well and in time: Duncan’s moustache was beginning to come unglued….

  One of the imposters revealed the joke to the press. Scandal, newspaper headlines, questions at Parliament. There was a great fuss. Commander Fisher couldn’t contain his rage; according to Virginia, boys followed Admiral May in the streets shouting “bunga-bunga.” Adrian had scored a success.

  One detail: although until the age of fourteen, he remained very short in a tall family that nicknamed him “the dwarf,” Adrian suddenly went through a growth spurt, achieving inordinate, exceptional, immense height. And he was handsome, as were all the Stephens.

  One word more: after their sister’s suicide, Adrian, mobilized as a medical officer, wrote to Vanessa:

  I had actually seen in some Sunday paper about Virginia’s body, but thank you for telling me….36 The whole thing is very unreal to me…. It is like a distant dream. For a good many years I had not heard … much of her and of course had never been nearly as close to her as you have always been so that anyhow it could not effect me like you. Since about 1914 in fact I have seen her rather seldom and have never been quite sure that she wanted to see me when we did meet. On the other hand in many ways the life before 1914 seems more real than life since then. Hyde Park Gate and St Ives are extraordinarily vivid and so are the days which, I suppose, ought to be called “Early Bloomsbury.” It does seem odd that, as you say, we are the only people left to remember our childhood.37

  A final note: shortly after Adrian’s death, Karin committed suicide.

  Virginia moved to Fitzroy Square, still in Bloomsbury, with her younger brother; Adrian would escort her to dances, concerts, costume parties, which she enjoyed; they would travel together, sometimes with Clive and Vanessa, to Paris, Florence, Milan, Bayreuth, Portugal, and the English countryside.

  Despite an active, conventional social life, or perhaps because of it, Virginia, now deserted, would struggle against a heavy, undermining boredom, a dull solitude. Torments that heighten what foments in her, which they feed: an unchanneled rage to write. “I begin to feel the desire of the pen in my blood.” “When I see a pen and ink, I cant help taking to it, as some people do to gin.” She vows she will become “the writer of such English as shall one day burn the pages.” When Madge Vaughan affirms that she considers her a genius (as Violet already has said), Virginia thinks the idea plausible and comments on it seriously, concluding: “I cant help writing—so there’s an end of it.”38

  She pursues her occupation of literary criticism, but it is primarily her solitude, bitter as she finds it, that allows her to devote herself entirely to the sensual pleasures that would make her into the writer she already is. For example, she writes to Violet, “I could be wed—pure simple notes—smooth from all passion and frailty.” She continues: “Now do you know that sound has shape and colour and texture as well?” She is already in the mind of the books, in the fullness of that thinking, and in the pungency of the circumstances that often surround the one who thinks.39

  Nevertheless the lack of other, more ordinary sensual pleasures, any love life for example, weighs on her. “I have been talking to young men for the last fortnight—Lamb and Sidney-Turner, but they remain so disinterested that I see how I shall spend my days a virgin, an Aunt, an authoress.” She imagines Nessa’s progeny: “Who was cousin Mia? Dont you like Uncle George? Why has Aunt Goat never married? I think you very beautiful Mama!” And this worry, trivial as it may seem, opens into gulfs of agonizing emptiness; she is overcome with “dreadful weariness … that we should still be the same people, in the same bodies; wandering not quite alive, nor yet suffered to die, in this pale light.” She is twenty-five years old.40

  Long walks over the course of solitary days in the country or by the sea, and the difficult, underground labor of a work about to be born, throbbing in her veins but there alone, which she herself does not yet know but which needs, demands to emerge and, by its nonexistence, heightens an atmosphere of isolation, desertion, a certain futility. A profound state of disarray.

  The void as a wall.

  Which her great perversity, or more bluntly, her bitchiness, will get her through. Or rather, will distract her from.

  Without the slightest scruple, the least pity (and moreover without really alleviating her depression), she is going to spoil her sister’s marriage, thus calculating her own power, feeling real desire and some pleasure in provoking the very masculine Clive, winning him over with a cunning, a talent, a method that would allow her to monopolize her brother-in-law openly before a paralyzed Nessa. Whom she never stops and would never stop loving. Whom she could never leave emotionally. And who, thus paralyzed, would have a delayed but enduring reaction to this suffering, this offense, lasting throughout their lives, punctually, instinctively, until the last fatal stroke, borne by Virginia.

  Virginia, whom she loves, who holds an essential place in her life and who will often charm her, but whom she will keep at a greater distance than is apparent, even though her sister will often be aware of it. In the Charleston circle, the tone will be the one inherited by Quentin Bell. Virginia’s superiority, arrogance, fierceness will be denied, as will her frantic demands for affection, and she will appear humble before the emotional
and sexual life she attributes to Nessa, whose maternity she reveres. She likes to think of herself as her sister’s child, asks her why she gave birth to her, and is anxious to be a willing partner from the start, symbolically, with the children who follow Julian. “We both very much wanted a daughter this time,” she writes to a friend with regard to Angelica. And to Vanessa: “You’ve given me Julian and Quentin and Angelica.”41

  But the first birth, Julian’s, will hardly move her. Babies have not yet entered into her desire or imagination. She doesn’t know yet that they will be denied her. As for Vanessa, she is monopolized, obsessed by her firstborn. Clive complains of never seeing her anymore, of no longer sleeping with her, now that she is interested only in the baby … whom he is afraid even to hold. While Virginia proclaims herself inept as a nurse.

  Together brother- and sister-in-law flee the cries of the newborn, of whom they say they are jealous. Together they go on long walks, which remained completely innocuous, unlike Virginia’s letters to Clive or even those addressed to her sister. Because it is through her attachment to Nessa—which she likes to describe as a love affair and which never wanes—it is through courting her sister through Clive, or courting Clive through her sister, that Virginia manages to achieve her goal: paralyzing Vanessa, beaten in advance, disarmed, strangely silenced. Bound hand and foot, as Virginia was a year earlier, facing her sister’s marriage and desertion. The illusion that nothing has changed in their relationship is part of the game, and at first glance, nothing seems to blemish, much less spoil their bond.

  But will Virginia ever know the extent, the depth of the wound Vanessa hides, letting nothing show, including, from now on, any heartbreak? Vanessa will remain forever closed, impenetrable on this point, locked down. Throughout her future life, she will let herself only be seen as a fulfilled woman, resolutely natural, happily provocative, a lavish mother, a satisfied lover, and fundamentally a painter.