Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

by Viviane Forrester

  These social differences, he adds, had since been swept away by the two world wars.

  If they first lived outside of London, in Richmond, it was to allow Virginia tranquility and to limit the social life that he considered disruptive for her, and that, more importantly, he found intimidating at the time and never to his liking. “I have always felt psychologically insecure. I am afraid of making a fool of myself, of my first day at school, of going out to dinner, or of a week-end at Garsington with the Morrells. What shall I say to Mr. Jones, or to Lady Ottoline Morell [sic], or Aldous Huxley? My hand trembles at the thought of it, and so do my soul, heart, and stomach. Of course, I have learnt to conceal everything except the trembling hand: one of the consolations of growing old is that one learns to talk to Mr. Jones and Lady Ottoline Morrell.”103 A hint here of the Leonard Woolf of Ceylon and of The Wise Virgins, elsewhere so well concealed under the mask he constructed for himself, which became his true face.

  A beautiful face, moreover, intent, sculpted by living as well as thinking. When Gisèle Freund photographed them together in 1938, he and Virginia resembled each other like brother and sister, illustrating Virginia’s definition of their marriage: “Are you in your stall, brother?”104 She is beautiful as well, more moving than in photographs of her at twenty; her look is poignant, tired of being forever fresh, expectant, searching for what is not given and taking delight in it.

  By that time, they have each constructed a life all their own and have learned how to live together. No longer is there a question of social hierarchy, as at the beginning of their marriage.

  A beginning in which Virginia’s fragility allows Leonard to dominate and even turn the tables. Newly married, broken down, Virginia thus allows him a mastery that alleviates his complexes and distracts their circle from their class differences, then such a powerful force in England. Their roles counterbalance each other. He is considered marginal as a Jew? She will be considered marginal as a mad woman.

  And she is the one who must, or believes she must, implore him to let her return to ordinary life a few months after their marriage, when she is confined to a rest home before her two crises which, despite everything, occur. Thus she has become the illegitimate one, the “strange” one, the outcast.

  We hear her frightened, anxious to cajole Leonard, courting him, playing a regressive role akin to the one of “Sparroy,” but this time with the urgency of convincing her husband that she loves him. Sparroy has disappeared, but they have become his Mongoose to her Mandrill (a species of baboon!). Exhausted, Mandrill tries to elicit enthusiasm difficult to access; breathlessly she declares herself, trying to demonstrate to Mongoose that she does not detest him, since she must make him listen to her.

  A few examples. “I’ve not been very good I’m afraid—but I do think it will be better when we’re together. Here its all so unreal.” “I do believe in you absolutely, and never for a second do I think you’ve told me a lie—Goodbye, darling mongoose—I do want you and I believe in spite of my vile imaginations the other day that I love you and that you love me.” “I have been disgraceful—to you, I mean.” “To begin with, I am to say from nurse, that I have been very good…. Dearest Mongoose, I wish you would believe how much I am grateful and repentant.”105

  Finally leaving the nursing home, we find Sparroy again, converted into Mandrill, but closer to Virginia and more sure of herself:

  Immundus Mongoosius Felicissimus, I could write this letter in beautiful silver Latin, but then the scurvy little heap of dusty fir could not read it. Would it make you very conceited if I told you that I love you more than I have ever done since I took you into service, and find you beautiful and indispensable? … Goodbye Mongoose, and be a devoted animal and never leave the great variegated creature. She wishes to inform you delicately that her flanks and rump are now in finest plumage, and invites you to an exhibition. Kisses on your dear little pate.106

  Intimate, erotic games, complicit exchanges adapted to their tastes, which will continue: in 1928, Virginia, departing regretfully (with Vita) for four days in France, is all the more nervous upon returning because Leonard, a subtle psychologist, has hardly written to her. After reassuring him on Vita’s role “always running about with hot water bottles,” she prepares her reconquest. “Poor Mandrill does adore your every hair of your little body and hereby puts in a claim for an hour of antelope kissing the moment she gets back.” “We adore dadanko do-do—we want to talk with him; and kiss the poos. Have they really begun to play violin, daddie? Are you fonder of them than of the marmoteski?—Now stop mots; go under the table. I cant hear myself speak for their chatter. How they sobbed when there was no letter from Dinkey to Avallon! Shall you be glad to see us all again?”107

  Unexpected dialect, far removed from the pages of Virginia—and of Leonard! Games, complicities that a posthumous intrusion allows us to witness and that often seem grotesque to outside eyes.

  We know that they lived out a long conversation together; but in writing, this self-conscious prose, this defensive regression in a stilted register seems to serve as a shell. An artificial, leaden register—playful, of course, but it keeps them at a distance from each other, prisoners of redundant roles, rehearsed speeches, repeated childishnesses, the skins of animals that disguise their actual presence and mask a great timidity. They do not address each other person to person.

  How different from the natural warmth in the streams of pages that flow not only from Virginia to Vanessa, “My dearest,” “My dear Dolphin,” but to Lytton, Clive, Maynard, or Quentin and of course to Vita, to so many others as well, Ethel Smyth in particular. What a gift for communication in them, what ease, what suppleness and what spirit, what laughter, sometimes what confessions or tears, and what casualness … how present Virginia is!

  Yes, but it is at Leonard’s side, leaning on him, having become his wife and once restored from her double breakdown, that Virginia will flee, will fly away from her identity in the end, delivered to a certain degree from the past, if not from its memory. It will manifest itself only later in its new version, so sad and uneasy, dangerous, and that version will be fatal to her.

  At present, that past will serve the work. It will be part of the pleasure—and the torment—of producing it.

  Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared, published by Gerald Duckworth, turned editor; still ill, she was not immediately aware of its publication. Its reception? Favorable, sometimes enthusiastic. Virginia Woolf ranked immediately as a writer the literary circles considered major, or soon to be so. She is present, just as she is, and thus she will remain, with her music, her writing, her obsessive fears, her place and her pursuit acknowledged, recognized.

  The Voyage Out? From the first pages, water, death, madness unleashed within the framework of a refined life, a controlled gentility. Immediately, savagery breaks through civilization’s makeshift calm and denounces the fundamental brutality of life, its deprivations, its essential threats, all the more terrifying in that they manage to spring up despite all the guarantees of safety and well-being promised to the privileged classes by post-Victorian British society, so able, unrelenting, practiced in sealing the cracks against all peril. A reckless, abrupt opening—without much connection to the rest of the novel. It is the threshold of a work; the voice of a writer immediately exposing the voices that will cross it.

  And what is it?

  It’s night and the murky waters of the Thames ripple under a bridge. On the bridge, an impoverished crowd, making an elegant couple, unusual here, nervous. The woman is crying, leaning over the parapet; a tear falls and mixes with the dark fluidity of the river. The man tries to calm the woman. She tells him that he understands nothing. The poverty all around oppresses them. Their confrontation with the masses, the poor. And a fine rain begins to fall over London.

  “Lord, how gloomy it is!”108 Mr. Ambrose groans, and “the poor, and the rain” render “her mind … like a wound.” These are not the novel’s actual characters that Virg
inia has introduced: the scene is still all her own, personal, the place of mental fury, a familiar disaster that she must initially project, establish, presenting the Ambroses there before the other protagonists enter.

  In this deep, gloomy night, one shelter: the elegant freighter where Mrs. Ambrose will embark alone; a cruise in the company of its owner, a rich cousin. Nothing more reassuring. Inside, the human oasis. A soft cage. Flowers, lights from the Thames. An old servant. A meal…. Amiable guests.

  But what do we hear? The text becomes frenzied without becoming meaningless. Fragments of sentences drifting from a learned conversation. They refer to people and events unknown to the reader, which never come up again in the novel. This is not the beginning of a plot or structure but an exchange of voices punctuated by exchange of signals, of ships lost in the fog. They speak of a devastated world. Blasts that obsess Virginia.

  A random glance at those first pages: “On a dark night one would fall down these stairs head foremost … and be killed….” “There was a book, wasn’t there? …” “There was a book, but there never will be a book….” “There never will be a book, because some one else has written it for him.”109

  And also: “He’s dead….” “Drink—drugs….” “There was a theory about the planets, wasn’t there? …” “A screw loose somewhere….” “The accumulations of a lifetime wasted.”110

  Outside, the night, the sea, “the great white monsters of the lower waters” and “the white, hairless, blind monsters lying curled on the ridges of sand at the bottom of the sea.” The sea “grew dimmer and dimmer until the sand at the bottom was only a pale blur. One could scarcely see the black ribs of wrecked ships.”111

  We discover Rachel, the main character, for whom the others appear like “aimless masses of matter, floating hither and thither, without aim except to impede her.”112 The voyage has begun.

  Virginia’s men and women from England find themselves on another continent, in Argentina, very exotic for them at the time. With diverse backgrounds, they come to vacation in villas, ordinary luxury hotels, nestled in luxurious vegetation. They do not know the laws of this new world and so maintain their own rules: those of propriety, which protect them from the panic of living, deprive them of the pleasure of existing. The water that pounds the luxurious shores and crosses the South American continent is still tied to that of the Thames; it is only an extension of it.

  A love affair develops finally, almost regretfully, in the last third of the book. What her fiancé Terence asks from Rachel and what he listens to feverishly in the voluptuous, tropical climate is the account of her life as a young girl in Richmond, among her shriveled old aunts and facing the eternal roast in a hideously decorated room: “Aunt Clara carves the neck of lamb…. There’s a very ugly yellow china stand in front of me.”113 Terence drinks in Rachel’s words, the secrets of a drab life, which he records and which evoke what matters to him, what worries and enthralls him: banality.

  They scarcely touch each other, remaining distant in an artificial happiness, and Terence watches her dreaming of being “flung into the sea, to be washed hither and thither, and driven about the roots of the world.” In ecstasy, he sees her in the hotel knocking into chairs, staggering about “as if she were indeed striking through the waters … she seemed to be cleaving a passage for herself, and dealing triumphantly with the obstacles which would hinder their passage through life.” He pins her to the ground. “‘I’m a mermaid! I can swim,’ she cried, ‘so the game’s up.’”114

  Virginia’s game. So many years yet, so many pages before it comes to an end in the River Ouse….

  If Rachel dies in bed, carried off by fever, it is with the sensation of falling

  into a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all her tormenters thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea.115

  A first work in which a great deal is said.

  Part 4

  VIRGINIA Woolf is well known, and thus she is protected. Soon, between her and those close to her, between her and Leonard, between her and herself, there will be a rampart consisting of her anonymous readership, her literary circle, and, most intimately, the Bloomsbury group. They will keep her steady with regard to her legitimacy. Her public persona. That of a recognized author, who will become famous. They will free her, in appearance at least, from the uncertain Virginia Stephen, confined until now within the family circle (nest or cesspool?), the pool of memories from which she will always draw.

  Beneath the armor of Virginia Woolf, Virginia Stephen will forever tremble, vulnerable, anxious. But Virginia Woolf is going to take off. She is in the public eye, prominent, encouraged. Better than accepted: required.

  “And there, I gave you a new book!” she rejoiced one evening, walking the streets of London.

  The first offering, The Voyage Out, drawn from the roots of her desire, her fears, her being; from seven years of work. The next one will stem from her fear of being judged a victim of insanity: she will want to present it as proof to the contrary, resulting in the “platitude” she recognizes it to be. It will be mediocre, and well received: Night and Day, in which she conceals the author she really is, hides Virginia Woolf … even while over the course of writing it she wholly becomes that author.

  After being ill and suffering every form and variety of nightmare and extravagant intensity of perception—for I used to make up poems, stories, profound and to me inspired phrases all day long as I lay in bed, and thus sketched, I think, all that I now, by the light of reason, try to put into prose (I thought of the Lighthouse then, and Kew and others, not in substance, but in idea)—after all this, when I came to, I was so tremblingly afraid of my own insanity that I wrote Night and Day mainly to prove to my own satisfaction that I could keep entirely off that dangerous ground.1

  Six novels later, she confesses to Ethel Smyth that she wrote that “bad book” still in bed after the second breakdown, when she was allowed to work half an hour each day. As small treats, she then allowed herself a few short, unrestricted texts now and then, a kind of compensation. A reward: “I shall never forget the day I wrote The Mark on the Wall—all in a flash, as if flying, after being kept stone breaking for months.”2

  And suddenly, she had known. She knew. She had recognized her “method of approach.” The future books appeared. She knew how she would find the form each time to shape her experiences. That moment she was completely at one with herself: soon, “Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway etc—How I trembled with excitement.”3 But …

  “Then Leonard came in, and I drank my milk, and concealed my excitement, and wrote I suppose another page of that interminable Night and Day (which some say is my best book).”4 The book that avoided danger and let her discover what she would avoid from then on: all concern for danger.

  We are in the arcana, in the veins of the work. Of its genesis. A secret stratum.

  Leonard and the milk will no longer do anything but come in, go out—a man nursing a woman he has denied children! Nothing will interrupt Virginia at work anymore. At work, she is untouchable.

  It is often with ironic indulgence that she lets Leonard pursue his obsessions. She lets her frustrations out on Richard Dalloway: “‘An hour’s complete rest after luncheon,’ he said. And he went. How like him! He would go on saying ‘An hour’s complete rest after luncheon’ to the end of time, because a doctor had ordered it once.” She denounces those doctors (and Leonard too) through Dr. Bradshaw, “insisting that these prophetic Christs and Christesses, who prophesied the end of the world, or the advent of God, should drink milk in bed, as Sir William ordered; Sir William with his thirty years’ experience of these kinds of cases, and his infallible instinct, this is madness, this sense.”5

  Still anxious to prove her stability, Virginia would sometimes make a great display of logical reasoning in her literary cr
iticism, making her pieces dull and scholarly.

  Elsewhere, she accepted every risk. The risk of approaching her work unarmed, confronting it naked, without certainty, stripped of what stands in the way of anguish: those protections, those … parapets; the construction around the general, hegemonic discourse, which has already catalogued, organized, compartmentalized, and restricted perception.

  The cerebral is organic, it adjoins emotion; Virginia knows instinctively, and she seizes thought raw, before the established meaning has corrupted it. The precise sound of the sentence thus reaches her and leads her to the pulp of what she covets. She will compose each novel according to methods not burdened by theorizing, new for each one, but without ostentation. Nothing deliberated, no plan: a plunge. A desire. And merged there, the body, a time of life, a musical technique extended toward this desire, in order to achieve it, fulfill it, discover what it harbors, develop it, and pour it into an invisible, skillful, and always unforeseen architecture. A work that, produced well out of bounds, could lead Virginia Woolf to the threshold of stability and make its author seem a stranger to reason.

  Leonard, open to his wife’s work, is not a worry on this point. Even if he considers madness inherent to genius and likes to think Virginia is continually threatened by insanity, he stands solidly behind each of her books,6 fully welcomes them, and defends them as editor as well. Each work will be given its due; each will be law within its own domain.