Returning, Vita prompts an atmosphere of vaudeville that is finally distressing: “Heaven knows what excuse I can make for staying that night [at Sissinghurst]. Can you invent one?” And in a panic as the summer ends: “Its the last chance of a night before London’s chastity begins.” She lives in constant desire, longing, sensuality as well, as reflected in the diary, but never specified: Leonard sometimes reads it. She suffers without Vita, whom she doesn’t see often.44
“I do adore you—every part of you from heel to hair. Never will you shake me off, try as you may.”45 But she will. And Virginia, tortured, senses that Vita, still close, is drawing away from her as a lover; so it’s something of the Scheherazade syndrome that gives rise to Orlando. A game. An attempt at seduction. An offering openly meant for Vita, delighted to be its hero/heroine. Orlando, man or woman according to the century, sets out through history with a patrician air suitable to Vita, an air of legend, from a castle similar to Knole, which she can’t inherit because she is a woman.
Having become a woman, Orlando is the target of a lawsuit: “The chief charges against her were 1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property whatsoever; 2) that she was a woman, which amounts to much the same thing.”46
It pleases Virginia to accompany Vita throughout these pages, and to amuse herself with a book that she nevertheless fears is “too long for a joke, & too frivolous for a serious book.”47 A writer’s holiday, but it addresses the condition of women before A Room of One’s Own, so full of charm, and Three Guineas, so serious. In Orlando, humor reigns.
The charm will not work as it did for Scheherazade. Imperceptibly, elegantly, always with spirit, the two women will cease to be lovers, Virginia brokenhearted; but in pure Bloomsbury style, they will always remain bound by affection, complicity, and their interest in each other. No clean break. For Virginia, a fissure, and imperceptibly as always, resignation.
A few years and … the effect of those years on the Vita of pearls and cashmere, of long legs and slender figure, confirms her loss: “I cant really forgive her for growing so large: with such tomato red cheeks and thick black moustache—Surely that wasn’t necessary: and the devil is that it shuts up her eyes that were the beaming beauty I first loved her for…. You’d never say she could turn a phrase; only whip a dog.”48
And Vanessa: “She has simply become Orlando the wrong way round—I mean turned into a man, with a thick moustache…. How have you done it?”49
Virginia often dreamed of women, as here, over a cup of tea with Mary Hutchinson: “Yesterday I had tea in Mary’s room & saw the red lighted tugs go past & heard the swish of the river: Mary in black with lotus leaves round her neck. If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure—the relationship so secret & private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it? truthfully?”50
When she was younger, a passionate, unstable friendship with Katherine Mansfield had blossomed with their first encounter: “I was fascinated, and she respectful, only I thought her cheap, and she thought me priggish; [but] she had a quality I adored, and needed; I think her sharpness and reality—her having knocked about with prostitutes and so on, whereas I had always been respectable—was the thing I wanted then.”51 Virginia herself had printed Prelude, which appeared when Hogarth Press was in its infancy. She had then hated, despised another long short story, Felicity, as she had continued alternately to love and despise Katherine.
But soon after, January 1923:
Katherine has been dead a week & how far am I obeying her “to not quite forget Katherine” which I read in one of her old letters? … Nelly said in her sensational way at breakfast on Friday “Mrs Murry’s dead! It says so in the paper!” At that one feels—what? A shock of relief?—a rival the less? Then confusion at feeling so little—then, gradually, blankness & disappointment; then a depression which I could not rouse myself from all that day. When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine wont read it. Katherine’s my rival no longer…. Sometimes we looked very steadfastly at each other, as though we had reached some durable relationship, independent of the changes of the body, through the eyes. Hers were beautiful eyes—rather doglike, brown, very wide apart, with a steady slow rather faithful & sad expression…. She looked very ill—very drawn, & moved languidly, drawing herself across the room, like some suffering animal … she was inscrutable. Did she care for me? Sometimes she would say so—would kiss me—would look at me as if (is this sentiment?) her eyes would like always to be faithful … she said she would send me her diary to read, & would write always…. She never answered my letter. Yet I still feel, somehow that friendship persists. Still there are things about writing I think of & want to tell Katherine.52
Katherine became a distant memory.
Less ethereal, so much older, Ethel Smyth would come to play as important a role as Vita, although platonic, when she burst in on Virginia, enthralled after reading A Room of One’s Own. Ethel, a suffragette who was once imprisoned for throwing stones at the prime minister’s window, now defended the cause of just one woman: herself. Alarmed, Virginia receives this septuagenarian who is in love with her, a composer, orchestra conductor, forever passionate, who declares that she considers herself the most interesting person she knows. She is odious and magnificent, magisterial, ridiculous. Their letters are so many eruptions of fury and confidence. Just looking at Ethel’s at the New York Public Library, in the Berg Collection, one is overcome with the desire to flee or to rip them up, the writing is so aggressive, their pages so teeming with dramas that give way in half an hour to a new letter and new dramas. But how alive she is! How vigorous and determined. In ecstasy before her victim. And most importantly, she takes Virginia seriously, she believes in her. She talks to her about her and listens to her free of all prejudice, and Virginia can remain just as she is before this hypergifted, hyperactive, hyperenthusiastic or indignant woman. Hyperexasperating as well: “You’ve got to listen to me—You’ve got to listen.”53
But Virginia finds herself listened to, respected, understood. To Ethel: “I scribble to you as I scribble in my diary.” She can speak to her without fear of “such caverns of gloom and horror open round me I daren’t look in.” Thanks to her friend, she can bear her solitude a little better, more calmly, level-headedly, within her circle. Without bitterness, she remarks that “Because everyone I most honour is silent—Nessa, Lytton, Leonard, Maynard: all silent; and so I have trained myself to silence; induced to it also by the terror I have of my own unlimited capacity for feeling…. But to my surprise, as time went on, I found that you are perhaps the only person I know who shows feeling and feels.” And then, most importantly: “What you give me is protection…. Its the child crying for the nurses hand in the dark.” However, “she is so old, so violent and sly,” she complains to Quentin Bell, as horrified as Leonard. “An old woman of seventy one has fallen in love with me. It is at once hideous and horrid and melancholy-sad. It is like being caught by a giant crab.”54
Ethel, more restless, with so much more character, plays something of the role of Violet Dickinson, many years earlier and long since forgotten. Virginia, now the author of an authentic body of work. “Don’t go on reading my works. Give it up,” Virginia had written to Violet, after a remark about them that had displeased her.55 Virginia Woolf, who now moves in other circles and around whom Virginia Stephen’s earlier witnesses are no longer welcome.
Nevertheless, in 1936 when Violet contacts her and proposes sending her her early letters, a rather excited Virginia cheerfully accepts. But when she receives them, handsomely bound, a forgotten Hyde Park Gate springs back to life and the shock overwhelms her: “At points I became filled with such a gust from her tragic past, I couldn’t read on…. All I beg of you is dont let anybody else read those letters.”56 She is moved to thank Violet for her support back then. Nevertheless, she doesn’t see her again.
Twenty-eight years earlier, Vanessa too had reacted with horror when she beca
me aware of Reminiscences, that first account of their childhood and adolescence written by Virginia when she was twenty-five. Rediscovering that “awful underworld of emotional scenes” had terrified her: “It seems to me almost too ghastly and unnatural now ever to have existed.”57
What stronger bond than that underworld they secretly endured together, those troubled, painful times they formerly shared? Than that memory inhabiting them still, sometimes tender and joyous, sometimes salting the wound of their grief? Than that freedom achieved in tandem, and even the betrayals that had followed! They never truly left each other; they would not let each other go, faithful in their jealousy, their rancor, their alliance. Not a single man to love them entirely, these two audacious women, so beautiful, feminine, condemned to chastity. And who could laugh together. Could keep each other from crying.
“I put my life blood into writing, & she had children.” Virginia’s leitmotif, which doesn’t stop her from admiring her sister, her relationship with Duncan: “Nessa and Duncan are so quiet always that when they go, it isn’t the noise that is less, but the substance.”58
From Charleston, the less indulgent Vanessa sighs to (and, as always, after) Duncan: “Leonard has gone today and Virginia will go tomorrow, when I hope we shall return to normal existence…. Yesterday, Vita came to lunch … Virginia held forth in her usual style which you know and I cannot describe, very amusing but also most uneasy, at least to my mind. The whole evening afterwards was spent in her mock apologies for having talked too much. It is brilliant of course and I suppose one sounds like curmudgeonly for finding any fault, but one simply gets exhausted and longs for some quiet talk.” Then comes the inevitable: “I wonder what you’ve decided about going to Bunny’s and when you’ll come here.”59
Virginia has no such anxieties; if she cannot manage without Leonard, Vanessa remains the one most dear to her, for better—their alliance—and for worse—their betrayals. Actually, so many of her intimates are indispensable to her, who could themselves do without her, like her sister who, although always available, remains inaccessible, reticent. We know what distress and fears Vanessa harbors and hides. What pride and mistrust make her withdraw into herself. Only grieving will allow her to express her sorrow, to break down without restraint and reveal, even expose her suffering, which is then redoubled. Angelica would remember her mother wailing for entire days and nights at the death of Roger Fry.
Unspeakable sorrow, much more than redoubled when Julian Bell, enlisted in the Spanish Civil War despite his mother’s pleas, is killed in Spain. Julian, who had “some queer power” over his mother, of “the lover as well as the son”; of a son who told her what she wanted to hear: that he could never love any other woman as he did her.60 Of a son who desperately tried to flee the grip of that mother, so frustrated in other respects. Going to teach in China had not been enough. In Spain, his wish would be granted.
Virginia, appalled, “the great cat is playing with us once more,” throws herself into saving Nessa, devotes herself to ensuring her survival. And she achieves it.61
Now equally unrestrained, she too can give her spirit free rein, reveal her tenderness toward her sister: “I’d rather think I’m more nearly attached to you than sisters should be.” She sees her every day, writes to her as soon as she returns to Rodmell and claims that attentiveness as a privilege for “your singe,62 who adores you, and cant stay away from you.” “Oh why are you the only person I never see enough of?” “You shant be rid of me for long.” And it is a privilege for Virginia to be able to express without restraint what she must ordinarily repress, for fear of awakening Nessa’s irony and distrust, Nessa always aware of the latent dispute that Virginia is forever trying to erase.63
The “unbelievable nightmare” must be eased. Virginia tries to keep Nessa awake and warm, to entertain her with one thing or another, life around them, always coming back to their childhood. It is to Vanessa, the shattered pietà, that she recalls Nessa, the little girl: “I’ve been always in love with her since I was a green eyed brat under the nursery table, and so shall remain in my extreme senility.”64
But if “no-one has penetrated the cave where Dolphin65 lies couched, like some proud sea monster,” this time Nessa responds.66 Overcome, ruined, sick, apparently lost forever, she comes back to life, begins to paint again, altered but saved, largely by Virginia. Whereas, emblematically, Vanessa will never speak to her sister of this period; she will direct Vita to tell Virginia (overwhelmed) that she knows what she owes her and thanks her for it.
“And dear old Clive,” Julian’s father, was not absent, “—he is such a pathetic, and always honest, man. cracking his jokes. to try and make us all laugh—wh. I admire.”67
Clive and Virginia had never completely stopped feeling something for each other, a certain emotion, Clive occasionally attentive, Virginia enjoying his visits: “He comes on Wednesdays; jolly, & rosy, & squab: a man of the world; & enough of my old friend, & enough of my old lover, to make the afternoons hum.”68
Bloomsbury! The feelings!
Time passes.
It passes for Virginia but remains immutable for Virginia Woolf when she is working; the course of her work doesn’t age. All her ardor, her solitude, the song that goes through it, and not her anger but her fury would go into an essay, Three Guineas, that would encounter hostility from Bloomsbury, the exceptional cold reception from Leonard. It would cause a scandal but find its audience.
Virginia Woolf gives herself over to it wholly, as never before. Drawing on inner resources and thinking as yet unrevealed in all their rigor—not even in her diary or her letters. A power of indignation, of political thinking that no one knew she had, that she did not permit herself, permeates it entirely. At Bloomsbury, it will not be recognized, it will not be acknowledged as such, with such a tone.
It is the question of women.
As in two of the earlier books. But where in Three Guineas does one find the gentle grace of A Room of One’s Own? The impulsive imagination of Orlando? Virginia, who knows so well how to transcribe silence and disturb language—who knows how to say and to make heard so much that she does not say—goes straight to the facts here, with the supporting figures. She goes straight to the roots of the problem: this world, of which she is an inhabitant, has been spirited away from her; men have usurped it, they occupy and control the territory. Virginia doesn’t get lost in idealistic reveries: their ends, their means are economic. The reason for this usurpation, which they call supremacy: exploitation. Men, who are the owners of the world, intend to remain so.
She describes the long oppression of daughters by their fathers, the right of sons to the family inheritance, the right of husbands over their wives’ destinies.
She describes the signs, codes, official decrees, unwritten laws, invisible obstacles that deny women free access to the world, to action, a right of way, independence, a viable relationship to their own bodies. In everything and everywhere, they must have an intermediary, a man, to win even—maybe—a chance to act.
“She wrote that book tongue in cheek,” Quentin Bell told me, but he also claimed … the opposite: “If I compare A Room of One’s Own to Three Guineas, I’m sure that A Room of One’s Own is better, as a work of art as well, because Virginia remains good humored in it, she’s witty. In Three Guineas, there’s anger and anguish. Moreover, she was really suffering at the time. She wasn’t thinking straight.”69
Or inside the box, actually.
One can certainly prefer one of these books over the other, one’s charm to the other’s unforeseen power. But Quentin only acknowledges the good-humored Virginia, what a sign! What better proof of the book’s thesis!
According to him, suffering undermines her credibility. Pleasant, cheerful, undisturbing when she is only somewhat critical, then she is acceptable, maybe even charming. But indignation is denied her. Resistance? Better not to mention it.
The solitude of women in a world impossible to read. The solitude of the writer who
knows how to read the world beyond the translations provided, and who perceives what flows (and how it flows) under the mountains of images heaped upon us. A world undressed. The king has nothing on, there is no queen; the realm is in ruin. She considers at length the photographs of a Spain strewn with bodies from the Civil War (among them Julian’s). She evokes the figure of the Duce, the Führer, recalls, ironically, the men outfitted in uniforms covered in knickknacks disguised as decorations, and wonders if women must join their parade. She is alone in this view, because the few women before her who have struggled so hard to obtain so little have done it to achieve the status of men.
No sexism, no utopia for her. Women, different from men, are not, for all that, perfect; she doesn’t even call them better. She doesn’t imagine a matriarchal paradise, a society of amazons, and doesn’t want a struggle against men, or even a separation from them: “A common interest unites us: it is one world, one life.”70
But, excluded by men, women are less trapped than men in the male system, in their world of hierarchy and exploitation; in 1938, they do not bear direct responsibility. They have a chance to begin differently; must they be denied it in a world where there are still, in fact, no women? Only the nullification of women by men, who reign as mournful conquerors over a mutilated world.
And, in a world staggering under the Spanish War, Nazism and Fascism at their height, she recalls an earlier tyranny heard in the news on the radio:
As we listen to the voices we seem to hear, an infant crying in the night, the black night that now covers Europe, and with no language but a cry, Ay, ay, ay, ay…. But it is not a new cry, it is a very old cry. Let us shut off the wireless and listen to the past. We are in Greece now; Christ has not been born yet, nor St. Paul either. But listen:
“Whomsoever the city may appoint, that man must be obeyed, in little things and great, in just things and unjust … disobedience is the worst of evils … We must support the cause of order, and in no wise suffer a woman to worst us … They must be women, and not range at large. Servants, take them within.” That is the voice of Creon, the dictator. To whom Antigone, who was to have been his daughter, answered, “not such are the laws set among men by the justice who dwells with the gods below.” But she had neither capital nor force behind her. And Creon said: “I will take her where the path is loneliest, and hide her, living, in a rocky vault.” And he shut her not in Holloway or in a concentration camp, but in a tomb. And Creon we read brought ruin on his house, and scattered the land with the bodies of the dead. It seems, Sir, as we listen to the voices of the past, as if we were looking at the photographs again, at the pictures of dead bodies and ruined houses that the Spanish Government sends us almost weekly. Things repeat themselves it seems. Pictures and voices are the same today as they were 2,000 years ago.71
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