Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

by Viviane Forrester

  What attachment, or acquiescence, because nothing obliged him to love Vanessa.

  Twelve years later, they are almost exactly at the same point. Only Bunny is gone, replaced many times over. This time, Duncan is dangerously in love with George Bergen; he believes he’s on the brink of leaving Vanessa, who believes it as well. Nothing could be less true. Vanessa will always know how to stop him. Stoic, flexible, she is expert at submitting, stubbornly suffering and living in torment, docile and deserted … guilty. She is the one who writes to Duncan: “Please don’t ever be unhappy about me…. Sometimes at night—when I used to give you such bad times—I get tired and feel melancholy. I think now the only thing I really mind at the moment is the complete uncertainty, not knowing in the least how long you will be away, nor what can happen afterwards.” “But the fact that I don’t know if he’s the kind of person who ever can live quietly near you and see us both and work and be happy with you makes it much harder for me.”84 And it is Duncan who comes back. With George.

  Is this the same Vanessa who shook with rage before the flouted Leslie? The Vanessa who, when the young Stephens all hid one evening from the calls of a widowed, aging, solitary father, was the only one to break the long silence after he asked them if they had intentionally tried not to hear him, to fling at him a “yes!”? Now she lives by one principle: “It seems better not to feel more than one can help.”85 And she does not succeed.

  But the Charleston song continues, strangely enduring. The song of a triumphant Vanessa, surrounded by her children, her husband, her lovers. Virginia admires her, adores her … and there is jealousy once again, a jealousy that Vanessa could not do without. Sometimes, but so rarely, she can no longer keep from unburdening herself, and Virginia, stupefied: “I have now written myself out of a writing mood; & cannot attack melancholy, save only to note that it was much diminished by hearing Nessa say she was often melancholy and often envied me—a statement I thought incredible. I have split myself among too many stools she said (we were sitting in her bedroom before dinner). Other peoples [sic] melancholy certainly cheers one.” But when she remarks, no doubt by chance and joking: “You and Duncan always seem to me, though some appearances are against it, marmoreally chaste,”86 Nessa, disconcerted, crushed, can only manage to answer: “It is terrible to be thought chaste and dowdy when one would so much like to be neither.”87

  She can rest assured: badly dressed or not, for Virginia, she will always pass for the most beautiful, the most free of women, the most filled with happiness and plenitude, living in rich sensual pleasures, bordering on luxury, satiated.

  When the Woolfs returned after their less-than-stimulating honeymoon, Nessa, then still content with Roger, took small revenge in happily writing Clive: “As I was in the middle of dinner in came the Woolves…. They seemed very happy, but are evidently both a little exercised in their minds on the subject of the Goat’s [Virginia’s] coldness…. Apparently she still gets no pleasure at all from the act, which I think is curious. They were very anxious to know when I first had an orgasm. I couldn’t remember. Do you? But no doubt I sympathised with such things if I didn’t have them from the time I was 2.”88 So much for you, Virginia, to quote Duncan Grant….

  In truth, they are both very similar to Mrs. Dalloway, relegated by her husband to sleep alone, and who “could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet.” This Clarissa Dalloway who entered her room “like a nun withdrawing … narrower and narrower would her bed be. The candle was half burnt down….” “It was all over for her. The sheet was stretched and the bed narrow. She had gone up into the tower alone and left them blackberrying in the sun. The door had shut.”89

  Here we return once more to the Woolfs, newly married and having just returned to London, each of them ready to fashion their life. A miraculous feat, because a life that leads to a work representing an existence rooted in the age can only belong to the order of miracles, whatever the obstacles and torments that lead it to tragedy.

  Long stretches of serenity, underlying conflicts, throughout years undercut by spite, resentment, deep contention: they will learn how to create their own choreography. To dance their pas de deux in mutual territory.

  Even while leading a contingent life of infinite emotions and excitement, Virginia will always manage to return to the limbo of perception. To watch for, to invoke, to confront what is going to dawn in its first essence, to emerge fragile and forbidden, all by itself, and which Leonard, on the sidelines, will not impede. Which is, in itself, enormous!

  Here are Leonard and Virginia on the brink of an alliance and here, springing from the ashes of Virginia Stephen, is Virginia Woolf. Ready to make her life exist, to bring her work to life.

  Here they are beyond the serious disturbances already mentioned: the two crises at the very beginning of their marriage that might be called attacks of madness. But certainly not in the sense of a “cancer of the mind” or a “corruption of the spirit,” an incurable ill, nor a cause for repudiation and exclusion as defined by Quentin Bell.90

  “Madness”? Often a dangerous simplification, a name given to the disasters encountered on the demanding journey of a man (or a woman) in search of her identities, in a manipulated world where she must, to her peril, approach the truest language.

  In addition, in Virginia’s case, the simplest, most mundane, clearly definable causes, which will go unrecognized despite their obviousness: for instance, the despotic brutality with which she has just been denied children. Under the pretext of mental instability, which will, in fact, precipitate it. The arrogant, abrupt prohibition imposed by Leonard left a powerless, somehow mutilated Virginia cornered. And she felt guilty.

  Too uncertain, self-doubting, shaken by the past, she could only accept the verdict that disqualified her. Which was not the result of a ban imposed by medical experts, as Leonard claimed and as she believed, but was decided by him, counter to the opinion of the attending doctor and strangely supported by practitioners who immediately accepted his version, responded to it as if asked to, and, let us repeat, without ever having seen, heard, examined, or even met Virginia.

  Added to the sexual fiasco of their marriage, it is Virginia’s whole female, sexual being that is denied, inversely violated, outraged, and it is her immense longing for tenderness that is ravaged.

  Which seems very much like another loss, a mourning this time for something essential that has never been and will never be.

  Her anguish? The same as so many women have felt, prompting in them the same kind of breakdown. Heightened by all the heavy losses of the recent past, all the ordeals suffered.

  In the final analysis, the instinctive pathological nature of her reaction, her violence, protected her. Remember her conviction: “Madness saved me”? By which she meant, from acquiescence, from resignation to dullness. But here madness saves her by letting her rage, very rationally shrieking her fury, her hatred for her husband, her rejection of an “equal world,” her sorrow at being ill used and perhaps having always been, under the guise of kindness. Having resigned herself so many times. Having so often resisted devastation.

  “I am alone in a hostile world, the human face is hideous,”91 she makes Rhoda say.

  As for Virginia, she will weep, refuse to speak, slam the door on Leonard; she will insult and injure him, reject all food, be violent toward the nurses; she will either remain mute and prostrate or talk nonstop for days on end. Leonard:

  in this stage she talked almost without stopping for two or three days, paying no attention to anyone in the room or anything said to her. For about a day what she said was coherent; the sentences meant something, though it was nearly all wildly insane. Then gradually it became completely incoherent, a mere jumble of dissociated words. After another day the stream of words diminished and finally she fell into a coma…. When she came out of the coma, she was exhausted, but much calmer; then very slowly she began to recover.92

  That “stream of words”
must have been among the most significant and eloquent ever uttered (think of Antonin Artaud’s glossolalia). Perhaps it was there she could express herself in absolute secrecy, under the veil of incoherence—incoherent only as compared to normal rhetoric and no doubt full of meaning. That logorrhea? Perhaps it was what she had to make heard, analyzable, what she externalized, brought forth and poured out, without freeing herself from it. And what gave her permission to be reintegrated among the others. Here where Leonard would never be completely reintegrated. Making his wife’s “madness” is indispensable to him.

  With this crisis, the last one, it is decided of course that Leonard will take Virginia in hand, but … for as much as he would like to: “Though you can tell a person like Virginia not to go for a walk or to a party, you cannot tell her not to think, work, or write.”93 Alas!

  Let’s be fair: he didn’t prevent her from thinking, working, or writing. On the contrary. The work is there. And perhaps the Woolf therapy method did some good? Because, even if he always spoke of Virginia’s madness as having punctuated their whole existence, having haunted her until the end, after those two crises, corresponding to their marriage and coming so close together, Virginia never experienced a single other one.

  Braced, even vigorous, dynamic, she suffered states of depression, despair, went through “horrors”94 she dreaded; she suffered from headaches, passed out two or three times; she experienced recurring health problems, but nothing analogous to “madness.” But the tension of having accepted such suffering or ecstasy, of having submitted to it, defenseless, stripped naked, in order to pursue her quest, her work, tested her nerves to the limit. She experienced life through all the fibers of her being. As she was. And she was fragile.

  Every single day Leonard would record—in the Tamil or Singhalese language and alphabet!—Virginia Woolf’s appetite, menstrual periods, sleep, weight, mood, her slightest symptoms or what he considered symptoms. He rules over her, leaves no stone unturned, and directs his wife’s daily existence beginning with the diagnoses that result from these intrusions, and that were as good as verdicts.

  Because she is in his hands, and she knows it. He has the power to institutionalize her, as Leslie (and Julia) had done to Laura. Henceforth, her freedom depends upon him, upon the husband to whom she gave herself.

  In truth … she is in no danger. He is already very attached to her: they each believe in the other’s value in areas essential to them. And after all … he is the one who depends on her. What would he become without Virginia Stephen in that sphere where his wife’s place is obvious and his is not yet, if he were not linked to her? Being an Apostle, a friend from Cambridge days, might allow him to remain in contact with those intellectual couples, but not to enter their circle, outside of which he suffocates. Except for finances, nothing would stand in the way of his returning to Ceylon or similar vicissitudes. And what would people say if Virginia entered “the occupation of madness,”95 as Van Gogh put it? And if Leonard had her put away? She must absolutely stay with him and watch over his ascendancy.

  He had already avoided having her “certified”96 in 1913, during a first crisis that followed almost immediately after she was forbidden children. That first time, she had not suffered from hallucinations or delirium, as in 1915. It had been a matter of unbearable anxiety, violent melancholy, prostration followed by a serious suicide attempt that, in England, would have justified automatic institutionalization, even legal proceedings. Leonard is urged to visit some asylums. But, horrified by what he discovers there, he sees that his wife is surrounded by nurses until she gets well.

  One can imagine his confusion, his terror at what falls to him. With hesitant authorization from the doctors, he takes Virginia away from London, but settles upon an inn in Holford … where their honeymoon had begun. His choice could not be worse, and Leonard is unaware of it.

  Holford for him? “It was primitive but extraordinarily pleasant.” Virginia had a tendency toward anorexia then. Not her husband: “Nothing could be better than the bread, butter, cream, and eggs and bacon of the Somersetshire breakfast with which you began your morning. The beef, mutton, and lamb were always magnificent and perfectly cooked; enormous hams, cured by themselves and hanging from the rafters in the kitchen, were so perfect….” And so on.97

  But Virginia takes no interest and refuses to eat, founders, goes from bad to worse. He takes her back to London, fearing the whole trip that she will throw herself off the train. Nevertheless she agrees to see Dr. Head, one of the doctors with whom he had met privately regarding “no children,” but whom “she could not possibly have known that I had consulted,”98 Leonard reassures himself. Which doesn’t prevent him from accusing his wife of fantasizing conspiracies….

  Head explains to Virginia that she is sick, as with a cold or typhoid fever, and that she must take care of herself, spend a few weeks in a nursing home. She seems to accept. They return to Brunswick Square. And Leonard suddenly remembers not informing Dr. Savage, Virginia’s attending physician, of their infidelity. He hurries to do so, leaving Virginia with a friend and … a box of medications containing veronal within her reach. Would you believe what happens? Leonard is alerted at Dr. Savage’s: Virginia, unconscious, is hardly, irregularly breathing. Geoffrey Keynes, a young surgeon and Maynard’s brother, happens to be at the house. He rushes Virginia, at death’s door, to the hospital and saves her.

  Sixty years later, Leonard, remembering, considers himself responsible:

  I had always kept my case containing the veronal locked. In the turmoil of arriving and settling in at Brunswick Square and then going to Head, I must have forgotten to lock it…. She must have found that it was unlocked and have taken the veronal. I suppose, as a truthful autobiographer, I ought to record two psychological bad marks against myself in connection with this catastrophe. Though I was the cause of it, I did not at the time and have not since felt the misery and remorse that many people would think I ought to feel…. I seem to be without a sense of sin and to be unable to feel remorse for something which has been done and cannot be undone—I seem to be mentally and morally unable to cry over spilt milk. In this particular case I felt that it was almost impossible sooner or later not to make a mistake of the kind.99

  More importantly, sooner or later it was “almost impossible” to prevent oneself from doing so.

  Difficult. But difficult for him as well, such trials at the very beginning of this marriage; a terrifying situation for which he was not prepared, that he doesn’t know how to manage, even if he bears much more responsibility for it than he admits.

  It is to Dalindridge, a luxurious property lent to them by George Duckworth and swarming with staff, countless chambermaids, housekeepers, and gardeners, that Leonard decides to take his wife to convalesce. An unfortunate choice, once again. For whether it was Vanessa or Dr. Savage who had spoken to him of it, Leonard knew the role of this half-brother, for whom he felt … only deferential admiration!

  His description of the master of Dalindridge, Sir George Duckworth:

  a man of the world or at any rate what I think a man of the world in excelsis should be. As a young man he was, it was said, an Adonis [dear Rupert Brooke!] worshipped by all the great and non-great ladies. He was still terribly good looking at the age of 45. A very good cricketer, Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge; he knew everyone who mattered; was a friend and private secretary of Austen Chamberlain … an extremely kind man and, I think, very fond of Vanessa and Virginia.100

  George was undoubtedly elegant and good looking. Kind? Perhaps. And he had certainly been fond of his half-sisters. But dangerously and excessively so. At least that was a certainty for them, which weighed on and seriously affected their lives, and which they went to great lengths to make known. Unbelievable to find Leonard not referring to it here, ignoring it to the point of not even mentioning it, even contradicting Virginia’s view, which was hardly insignificant and which, God knows, she did not hide.

  Woolf had been deepl
y impressed by George since his first visits with his fiancée’s family. Another description: “Virginia’s half-brother, Sir George Duckworth. Eton, Trinity College, Cambridge, married to Lady Margaret Herbert, very handsome, immensely kind and charming, and—it has to be admitted—a snob.”101 Snob? All the more validating! Nothing if not demonstrative, George must have proved to be very cordial and even affectionate.

  Whereas Leonard describes himself as having a terrible complex about his social background. The Stephens and the Duckworths were for him of

  a social class and way of life into which hitherto I had only dipped from time to time as an outsider, when, for instance, I stayed as a young man with the Stracheys. I was an outsider to this class, because, although I and my father before me belonged to the professional middle class, we had only recently struggled up into it from the stratum of Jewish shopkeepers. We had no roots in it…. The Stephens and the Stracheys, the Ritchies, Thackerays, and Duckworths had an intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching far and wide through the upper middle classes, the county families, and the aristocracy. Socially they assumed things unconsciously which I could never assume either unconsciously or consciously. They lived in a peculiar atmosphere of influence, manners, respectability, and it was so natural to them that they were unaware of it as mammals are unaware of the air and fish of the water in which they live. Now that I was going to marry Virginia and went round to see her relations, I began to see this stratum of society from the inside. I said in Sowing that I know that I am ambivalent to aristocratic societies, disliking and despising them and at the same time envying them their insolent urbanity. In a milder form there was the same ambivalence in my attitude to the society which I found in Dalindridge Place and St. George’s Square. I disliked its respectability and assumptions while envying and fearing its assurance and manners.102