Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

by Viviane Forrester

  Does Virginia suspect the seriousness of this new divide, which Vanessa will manage instinctively and which will often shape Virginia Woolf’s destiny?

  Virginia alters the trajectory of Vanessa the young wife, sensual and jubilant beside Clive: “It is like being always thirsty & always hav[ing] some delicious clear water to drink.” The trajectory of a young woman overflowing with exhilaration, eager for sensual pleasure and fulfilled, confident in life, and who moreover will always seem that way, to the point that Virginia will rejoice in their mature years: “I always measure myself against her, & find her much the largest, most humane of the two of us, think of her now with an admiration that has no envy in it: with some trace of the old childish feeling that we were in league together against the world; & how proud I am of her triumphant winning of all our battles: as she [battles?] her way so nonchalantly modestly, almost anonymously past the goal, with her children round her.”42

  That is one aspect of Vanessa, the aspect she wished to present, but if she seems always to float in peace, sensual delight, and idyllic romance with Duncan Grant, she lives forever in terror of being left and … accepts living by his side in chastity.

  She might have envied Virginia for Leonard’s unconditional presence, the unquestioned durability of their marriage. That peaceful zone. But it is Virginia, forever deceived by the role of sensual, fulfilled woman Vanessa played, who envies her sister: “I was rather depressed when you saw me—What it comes to is this: you say ‘I do think you lead a dull respectable absurd life—lots of money, no children, everything so settled: and conventional. Look at me now—only sixpence a year—lovers—Paris—life—love—art—excitement—God! I must be off!’43 This leaves me in tears.”

  Virginia has no cause for such tears, even if she is joking. Henceforth Vanessa lives as chastely as Virginia, but desiring, scorned by, and accepting, claiming for life in order to keep close to her for life the irresistible, delightful, volatile Duncan Grant. Who will never leave her.

  Real tears, on the other hand, weighed heavily on the two sisters’ lives: tears secretly shed by Vanessa, betrayed from the start of her marriage. Eighteen years later, promising to tell the recently widowed Gwen Raverat the whole story of her life, Virginia mentions only “my affair with Clive and Nessa I was thinking of when I said I envied you and Jacques at Fitzroy square” that wounded her forever and “turned more of a knife in me than anything else has ever done.”44

  Her niece, Vanessa’s daughter, Angelica Garnett, holds that this time left “a permanent scar. Years later, seeing them together, in spite of their habitual ironic affection and without any idea of the cause, I could see in their behaviour a wariness on the part of Vanessa, and on Virginia’s side a desperate plea for forgiveness.” So much so that, faithful to the Stephen tradition, they never confronted each other on that point, never said anything about it, “aloud” at least.45

  And it’s true, Virginia will implicitly, endlessly seek pardon from her sister. Throughout their constant, delightful exchanges, their elegant familiarity, the irresistible grace with which each of them shows up for the other, full of enthusiasm, closeness, never letting themselves go, as if always wanting to dance for the other. Often daily, their letters pass between their Rodmell and Charleston houses, a short bicycle ride apart, irresistibly funny or deeply moving; simultaneously mocking, immediate, sincere, and warm; savage toward their circle; carefully written as if they each had to win back the other, though they had just left each other, or would lunch together the next day. But only Virginia tells all.

  Vanessa would remain her lodestar, refuge, landmark, and always in a playful way, her triumphant rival. But for Nessa, there was nothing playful, much less triumphant about suffering a sister’s rivalry in the early years of her marriage, resulting in isolation, one disaster after another, and a futile search for a husband. “No one has asked me to marry them,”46 complains Virginia to Violet. But Virginia Stephen is primarily caught up in what is developing within her, what she lets shape her: what creates the writer about to become Virginia Woolf.

  From this tangle, from Virginia’s emotional misery, arises a formidable foe, surprisingly well-armed, who charges at her sister. Caught off guard, Vanessa hasn’t a chance and serves as intermediary for Virginia, who writes to Clive: “Kiss her, most passionately, in all my private places—neck—, and arm, and eyeball, and tell her—what new thing is there to tell her? how fond I am of her husband?”47

  To this husband, she will soon write: “The main point of all this is that we are very fond of each other; and I expect we shall make out a compromise in time. I suppose we shall see more clearly what is what.” She will have her goal in sight: “Why do you torment me with half uttered and ambiguous sentences? my presence is ‘vivid and strange and bewildering.’ I read your letter again and again, and wonder whether you have found me out…. I was certainly of opinion, though we did not kiss—(I was willing and offered once—but let that be)—I think we ‘achieved the heights’ as you put it. But did you realise how profoundly I was moved, and at the same time, restricted, by the sight of your daily life.” And singing her habitual praises to Vanessa: “Ah—such beauty—grandeur—and freedom—as of panthers treading in their wilds—I never saw in any other pair. When Nessa is bumbling about the world, and making each thorn blossom, what room is there for me?” Clive’s response: “I wished for nothing in the world but to kiss you. I wished it so much that I grew shy and could not see what you were feeling.”48

  No, Vanessa hasn’t a chance, she is in checkmate. Withdrawn, fierce, silently she paints with Julian at her side. So powerful in appearance, a fighter, from now on she will always withdraw in such circumstances. She barely alludes to it: “Dont forget to keep my husbands letters for me to see or are they too private?” From her own torments Virginia seems to have learned the art of tormenting better. She is ruthless. When Nessa wants out of the game, wants to lay all the cards on the table … Virginia immediately writes to Clive, feigning humor: “Your wife gave me such a talking to the other day; she will deny it, but dont believe her. She said I never gave, but always took. In this case, as she must own, I have been forced to take.”49

  Her many letters to Vanessa are very often intended for Clive, written for him. She explains to her sister: “Ah! there’s no doubt I love you better than anyone in the world! … I dont in the least mind your showing Clive my letters; because I dont make much difference between you.” And when she writes to Vanessa: “Shall you kiss me tomorrow? Yes, Yes, Yes. Ah, I cannot bear being without you. I was thinking today of my greatest happiness, a walk along a cliff by the sea, and you at the end of it,” yes, when she writes these words, whom is she addressing?50

  But it is to Clive that she apologizes when one of their rendezvous at her house is interrupted: “Next time (which I dont dare to suggest) I will make the proper arrangements, but I’m certain that I shall never have the courage to turn people out when they’re on the stairs—not if I’m in my lovers arms!”51

  The lover’s arms that moved Virginia, that elicited from her both desire and pleasure. A woman’s feelings for a man. Did she compare those experiences with Leonard’s attitude (and aptitude), his avoidances? To Ethel Smyth, she would confess: “When 2 or 3 times in all, I felt physically for a man, then he was so obtuse, gallant, foxhunting and dull that I—diverse as I am—could only wheel round and gallop the other way.”52 Such was Clive’s reputation in the Bloomsbury circle, as the two sisters later lampooned him, but the Clive that had attracted Virginia had aroused her desire, and she had not run in the other direction.

  Clive, also aroused, nevertheless rekindles an old affair with Mrs. Raven-Hill, a “very experienced” woman in their circle.

  Clive and Virginia’s exchanges play another, more serious role, however: Clive becomes Virginia’s first reader, the confidant for her writerly hopes. She recognizes in him dreams he already knows he is incapable of converting into works, but he is equal to them. Though he no
longer dreams, or rarely. She addresses herself to him, awaits a hearing, a reading from him. To him she has already claimed: “I shall re-form the novel and capture multitudes of things at present fugitive, enclose the whole, and shape infinite strange shapes.”53

  She began to write Melymbrosia, an early version of a novel that, after seven years of work, would become The Voyage Out. It is this early manuscript that she nervously entrusts to Clive: “They [her words] accumulate behind one in such masses—dreadful, if they are nothing but muddy water.”54 Water, always and once again….

  Objective, often very critical, Clive immediately understands the importance of these words. A strange man, Clive. Perhaps, out of the whole Bloomsbury group, the one who will live with the most fervor and style. Nevertheless a shallow man, tawdry sometimes, born into wealth in the English countryside; his tastes are regarded as rural, unrefined, and his Cambridge friends consider him the most trivial among them, a socialite, nouveau riche, and superficial (judging, once again, from Leonard’s reactions in Ceylon). In fact, he is among the most instinctively elegant men, with a facility and passion for art—he is an art historian—which he reveres with discernment and modesty. No narcissist, he is thus more sure of himself than of others. Behind the frivolous air of amateur aesthete, ladies’ man, hedonist, he is perhaps the most sensitive, possessing the most conviction. The most faithful. The most resigned to being only himself, but able to take advantage of it.

  Reading Virginia and advising her, seeing these pages emerge still shaky or too stiff, recognizing in his sister-in-law a writer of original and still unknown power, he stops in his tracks, considers his own life, his own place in his own life, and concludes: “Tout va bien, le pain manque!” And then this heartfelt cry, confided to Virginia: “I sometimes … could almost cry for the beauty of the world; that is because I am not great, I can’t lay hold on it; I just go fingering the smooth outside, for ever pushing it out of my grasp…. I am condemned all my life, I think, to enjoy through an interpreter; but then as the interpreter is art one must not complain too much.” He sees with perfect clarity.55

  A surprising Clive Bell, like the one who offers Virginia magnificent advice, proof of a deep intuition about her aims, which he discerns better than she does: “We have often talked about the atmosphere that you want to give; that atmosphere can only be insinuated, it cannot be set down in so many words. In the old form it was insinuated throughout, in the new it is more definite, more obvious, &, to use a horrid expression—‘less felt’—by the reader I mean.”56

  And again: “To give more ‘humanity’ to your work, you sacrificed the ‘inhuman,’—the super-natural—the magic which I thought as beautiful as anything that has been written these hundred years; in so far as the book is purely Virginia, Virginia’s view of the world is perfectly artistic, but isn’t there some danger that she may forget that an artist, like God, should create without coming to conclusions.” He analyzes Virginia’s manuscript in detail, with severity, but marvels: “It seemed to me that you gave your words a force that one expects to find only in the best poetry.”57

  “Ah, how you encourage me!”58 cries Virginia.

  Ten years later, the trio’s relationship, stripped of all amorous feelings, had long since calmed down. Vanessa left Clive for Roger Fry, then left Fry for the ever adored Duncan Grant. But they all remained close friends, often gathering in London and almost every weekend at Charleston, where Clive also spent extended stays accompanied by his successive mistresses. He and Vanessa always remained officially married; he approved of Nessa’s pregnancy by Duncan, and until Angelica Bell was sixteen years old, she believed him to be her father, an attached and inattentive father, as he was for his two sons, Quentin and Julian.

  Virginia had become Virginia Woolf, and Clive, nicknamed “the parrot”59 by the two sisters, became the target of their private jokes, though they remained very attentive and curious about him; his successes with women may have sometimes vexed them a bit, especially Virginia, who still felt vaguely proprietary.

  Ten years later, Clive writes to Virginia of his admiration for “The Mark on the Wall,” which has just been published, and wonders if it is wise for him to send this laudatory letter at the risk of making himself ridiculous. Virginia answers him:

  I’ve always thought it very fine—the way you run risks…. You know you always told me I was notorious for vanity, and its still a fine plant, though growing old. But please dont put it all down to vanity. I do like you to praise me, not only because of your gift for knowing whats what, but for you would call sentimental reasons too—as for instance that you were the first person who ever thought I’d write well.60

  In 1956, Virginia long dead, Clive writes to Leonard regarding his sister-in-law’s letters, which would not be published until 1975:

  I have a notion that the earlier and less “gossipy” letters—the letters in which Virginia talks about her writing and her difficulties as an artist—are the most interesting. I will confess that I very much hope you will print a letter dated “Tuesday, Hogarth House,” and beginning with “I’ve always thought it very fine etc.” Vanity? Not exactly perhaps. But there is a sentence—“you were the first person who ever thought I’d write well,” which seems to me the finest feather I shall ever be able to stick in my cap.61

  Virginia’s sister also read Melymbrosia. The havoc its author wreaked on her married life did not prevent Nessa from exclaiming: “How envied I shall be of the whole world some day when it learns on what terms I was with that great genius.”62 She’s hardly joking.

  Virginia would always turn to her, dependent upon the one she shamelessly offends and wrongs: “Beloved, To my great melancholy, I have had no letter from you today…. If I were to hint at all the miseries which steal out when you don’t lull them to sleep, I should only be chidden.”63 Nessa responds tenderly.

  They are bound by so much past joy, emptiness, grief, by what they call a “very close conspiracy”:64 the two of them so long united against the world in general, and Hyde Park Gate in particular. Neither of them could bear that memory without sharing its weight with the other one. What each of them would lose in losing her sister’s love, ambiguous as it may be, is immeasurable. The past that undermines them and comprises them would grow even heavier, weighed down for each of them by what they could not share. The past would waver, becoming murkier or disappearing from memory, one more loss to suffer—one more absence to bear, and more devastating than any recollection, no matter how heavy or morbid. Each of the two sisters maintains the other in the weave of her history.

  Many entries in Virginia’s diary resemble this one:

  Mercifully, Nessa is back. My earth is watered again. I go back to words of one syllable: feel come over me the feathery change: rather true that: as if my physical body put on some soft, comfortable skin. She is a necessity to me—as I am not to her. I run to her as the wallaby runs to the old kangaroo. She is also very cheerful, solid, happy…. And how masterfully she controls her dozen lives.65

  The letters they exchange over those two or three years of betrayals, snubs, and wounds inflicted by Virginia remain so intimate that, Vanessa remarks, anyone else reading them would take them for passionate love letters.

  But Virginia lacks a husband, and Vanessa reassures her: “I know that we are near the end of another stage and you soon will be married. Can’t you imagine us in 20 years’ time, you and I the two celebrated ladies, with our families about us, yours very odd and small and you with a growing reputation for your works, I with nothing but my capacities as a hostess and my husband’s value to live upon? Your husband will probably be dead, I think, for you won’t have boiled his milk with enough care, but you will be quite happy and enjoy sparring with your clever and cranky daughter. I’m afraid she’ll be more beautiful than mine, who I know will take after the Bells.”66 She resolves during her next pregnancy to avoid the Bell family and concentrate on Mrs. Cameron’s photos of the sublime Julia.

  V
irginia’s marriage in Vanessa’s eyes? A major stake, the best means of detaching her from Clive; it is with all the greater zeal that she follows the tribulations of her sister, hard pressed for suitors—an abiding mystery. And Virginia is twenty-eight years old.

  Vanessa’s ideal brother-in-law: Lytton. But, she admits, he would have to fall in love with Adrian! Failing that, she worries about Hilton Young’s wavering, “like an elephant in a china shop,” who would not be suitable for Virginia. For lack of a better option, she resigns herself: “Has Hilton Young written and come and proposed yet? At this moment you may be refusing him….” Alas, no. And Virginia: “No answer from H[ilton] Y[oung], I am begin to feel nervous,” and three days later, again: “Nothing from H.Y.” It’s not a question of love, but rather a matter of escaping the much maligned status of “spinster.” (Julia had been a frantic “matchmaker,” resulting in disastrous couples; she considered marriage the only way a woman could achieve meaning and social standing.) Clive doesn’t count here, he is only a bitter digression, a compensation, a temporary substitute, and Virginia dreams of “all the lovers (who wont love me) in the world.”67

  Strange symptoms surface. At Manorbier where she is staying in Wales, she slips and talks about the cliffs where she walks, claiming she doesn’t want to fall; she recounts murders that have taken place in the area, climbs a hill imagining herself as Christ at Calvary and finds it so funny that she begins to laugh, comforted. In a very strange letter to Emma Vaughan, she makes incoherent erotic remarks about the old cousins turned lecherous, who seem to hold some kind of weird witches’ sabbaths until one of them cries, after nightfall: “I’m only a little bag of bones—And the bed is so big!” Finally Virginia makes fun of the Vaughans with the farmer who rents her a room and they laugh “till the spiders waltzed in the corners, and were strangled in their own webs.”68