Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

by Viviane Forrester

  The voice one hears here is political, but it is the voice of a woman whose husband, Leonard Woolf, claims “was the least political animal that has lived since Aristotle invented the definition.” And everyone smiles, Virginia first among them. The Angel in the House is never completely exterminated! Even in the one who, alone, very much alone, writing in her diary, already senses not only “the faces & the voice” but one of the sounds of the coming war and the horror on its way: a horror for the horror, conscious, planned.72

  And that war is approaching. Yet another encounter: with Freud.

  This time the decision to translate and publish him was Leonard’s, fifteen years earlier in 1924. Virginia’s less lucid remarks at the time: “I’m rather alarmed at the productivity of the Hogarth press this autumn—having laid out 800 pounds in the works of Freud, which will sell they say because he has cancer; but I doubt any book selling that isn’t Berta Ruck.”73

  A single encounter, time for a cup of tea and the gift of a flower when Virginia goes to see him as co-editor with Leonard. But once the flower (a narcissus!) is presented to Mrs. Woolf, Freud will only address Leonard, who recounts this meeting:

  The Nazis invaded Austria on March 11, 1938, and it took three months to get Freud out of their clutches. He arrived in London in the first week in June…. I made discreet enquiries to see whether he would like Virginia and me to come and see him. The answer was yes, and in the afternoon of Saturday, January 28, 1939, we went and had tea with him…. Nearly all famous men are disappointing or bores, or both. Freud was neither; he had an aura, not of fame, but of greatness. The terrible cancer of the mouth which killed him only eight months later had already attacked him. It was not an easy interview. He was extraordinarily courteous in a formal, old-fashioned way—for instance, almost ceremoniously he presented Virginia with a flower. There was something about him as of a half-extinct volcano, something somber, suppressed, reserved. He gave me the feeling which only a very few people whom I have met gave me, a feeling of great gentleness, but behind that gentleness, great strength.74

  And then, an incident: strangely enough, Leonard is surprised to see Freud turn bitter (and nonetheless amused) when he tells him about the trial of a man accused of stealing books, one of Freud’s among them. At the end of the trial, the judge said he wanted to punish the thief by condemning him to read Freud’s book. “His books, he said, had made him infamous, not famous,” remarks Leonard. Freud must have taken the story seriously and must have stewed over it, been obsessed by it, because three days later he writes to Leonard (not to Virginia): “Handicapped in the use of your language I think I could not give full expression to my satisfaction of having met you and your lady. The condemnation delivered by the Norwegian judge I take to be a misrepresentation or a bad joke by a malicious journalist.”75

  Was it really necessary for Leonard to launch into that anecdote during such a brief visit?

  Their excellent editorial relations with Freud become difficult only when he simultaneously sells the U.S. rights to his works to two publishers, one of which is Hogarth.

  However, psychoanalysis doesn’t get good press in Bloomsbury. Alix Strachey, Lytton’s sister-in-law, wife of James Strachey, with whom she translated the Freudian opus and who was one of the first psychoanalysts to practice in England, confirmed this in 1973, when I visited the beautiful woodland home that she and James had designed. She was living there alone, widowed, elderly, in great style, surrounded by canvases by Duncan Grant, Carrington, Vanessa Bell, among the portraits and busts of Lytton.

  She and James had been analyzed in Vienna by Freud right before their marriage in 1920. The first (and last) case of a wife and husband analyzed together by Freud. The couple had remained very discreet, according to Alix: “If I thought certain things, I would not say them,” she claimed innocently. Alix, an analyst who “never discussed James’s decisions” and evidently could not think “certain things” about him!76

  Freud decided not to treat them as patients: “Instead of doing nothing but listen and interpret, he spoke to us of analytical theories and taught us. That was not a good idea, he realized later.”77 All methods he would renounce, like inviting these “patient-students” to tea with his family.

  James and Alix return to London dubbed. “In those early times, Freud was rather an autocrat. He just simply declared us members of a British or Austrian psychoanalyst society. He simply said: ‘I want these two people to be members,’ and we entered by the front door with no effort.”78

  Did Freud’s work have much influence on the Bloomsbury group? “No, none,” and Alix Strachey, a little bitter, says: “I don’t think the Bloomsbury people wanted to be bothered by what could change their approach, for example, to psychology. After we returned from Vienna, things were never the same between them and us. Never as lively. Adrian also became a psychoanalyst, and that cut him off from the others. Nothing disagreeable happened, but they were never again as intimate.”79

  It’s true that Virginia takes a dim view of her brother’s (late) conversion to psychoanalysis, depressed as he was until then. Witnessing his practice: “I creep up and peer into the Stephen’s dining room where any afternoon, in full daylight, is to be seen a woman in the last agony of despair, lying on a sofa, burying her face in the pillow, while Adrian broods over her like a vulture, analyzing her soul—”80

  George Duckworth, by his very naïveté, would prove to be most open-minded; so touching, moving, when he exclaims spontaneously and with great feeling: “Oh but does that mean you’ll be able to cure poor Laura?”81 Laura, so long forgotten.

  Unless the very idea was enough to worry him.

  An often-asked question: why wasn’t Virginia analyzed? Countless answers from her contemporaries. Too dangerous, according to some; according to others, for someone considered manic-depressive like Virginia, psychoanalysis could do nothing at the time, focused as it was on psychosis. Or this: Leonard did not want a third party to come between them. Leonard, who joked about making a speech in a suit and tie before hundreds of psychoanalysts: “I found it an intimidating experience, partly because they would know (1) what I was thinking, (2) that I was not thinking what I thought I was thinking, (3) what I was really thinking when I was not thinking what I thought I was thinking.”82

  Moreover, Virginia would have been opposed to it, afraid of losing her identity as a writer, of the effects on her ability to write. Perhaps a sign of withdrawal, fear, rejection: she read nothing by Freud before their meeting. A few months later she dove into his work “to enlarge the circumference. To give my brain a wider scope: make it objective; to get outside. Thus defeat the shrinkage of age.” Soon, she is devouring it (“I’m gulping up Freud”). At his death, announced by the newspaper hawkers on September 23, 1939, she remarks that only such “little facts” offer a break from the monotony of war—declared just twenty days earlier!83

  The specific horrors of that war Leonard had foreseen well before it was declared, and here we find them described in all their brutality:

  Jews were hunted down, beaten up, and humiliated everywhere publicly in the streets of towns. I saw a photograph of a Jew being dragged by storm troopers out of a shop in one of the main streets in Berlin; the fly buttons of the man’s trousers had been torn open to show that he was circumcised and therefore a Jew. On the man’s face was the horrible look of blank suffering and despair which from the beginning of human history men have seen under the crown of thorns on the faces of their persecuted and humiliated victims. In this photograph what was even more horrible was the look on the faces of respectable men and women, standing on the pavement, laughing at the victim.84

  With that war, the long fruitful day spent removed from those horrors, the day that lasted more than twenty years for Virginia, would come to an end. The time of hostilities would mark her last battle before the “embrace” of death, as Mrs. Dalloway calls it.85

  Part 5

  “ALL the walls, the protecting & reflecting wal
ls, wear so terribly thin in this war.” And soon: “No audience. No echo. Thats part of one’s death.” Especially as her solitude with Leonard increases and the rampart formed by the public, friends, others gradually dissolves.1

  But at first, after they leave London to take permanent refuge at Monk’s House, there will be the happiness of days that ring “from one simple melody to another,” and Virginia will have “never had a better writing season.” For months, she will be seized with a passionate desire to live despite the pact we know about, her joint suicide pact with Leonard, should England be invaded. She will still cast herself entirely into a future time, under bombardment at Rodmell and its surroundings every evening, located in the air corridor between continental Europe and London.2

  Around her, friends like Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman & Nation, discuss possible suicides. “I dont want to die yet,” she says to Leonard, hearing the bombs. But in her pocket, morphine provided by Adrian. Morphine, the garage, the suicide envisioned by Leonard if the Nazis…. And she has book projects for at least ten years “if Hitler doesn’t drop a splinter into my machine.” The vanquished continent of Europe belongs almost entirely to the Nazis.3

  Virginia sighs: “Yes, I was thinking: we live without a future.” Even Marie Woolf finally dies in July 1939, after holding out against old age like “a cricketer doing a record score.” Anti-Semitism is no longer in fashion. The Bloomsbury crowd has dispersed; the gasoline shortage prevents them from getting together often. Virginia searches the ruins of the London apartment, destroyed during a bombing raid, to find her diaries and her parents’ letters. Hogarth Press is partly moved out of town; John Lehmann (to whom Virginia sold her shares while still retaining her role at the publishing house) takes over the day-to-day operations. Leonard only goes to London once or twice a week. He and Virginia are still selling books to the bookstores in 1940.4

  But gradually time grinds to a halt, and Virginia, far from everyone, insidiously neglected by Leonard, slips into a fatal isolation: “Those familiar circumvolutions—those standards—which have for so many years given back an echo & so thickened my identity are all wide & wild as the desert now. I mean, there is no ‘autumn’ no winter…. I cant conceive that there will be a 27th June 1941.”5 For her, there won’t be one.

  After having worked, struggled, as in every moment of her life, but this time struggling against the worst threats with the worst weapons, Virginia Woolf in isolation would founder.

  Alone, confined, adrift.

  “The play was over, the strangers gone.”6 Nearly every page of Between the Acts utters a calm, inexorable farewell, to what is no more than the territory of farewell. But a farewell that she is still observing, without preparing herself for it.

  Whatever makes her capsize, this work is not to blame. On the contrary, it exorcises its content. Despite the havoc of the war, Virginia feels productive again, as hungry for books as when she was a child, and finds herself “a little triumphant about the book. I think its an interesting attempt in a new method. I think its more quintessential than the others…. I’ve enjoyed writing almost every page.”7 She has five months left to live.

  But she notes that she must write those pages in the intervals left by “the drudgery of Roger.”8 That disaster.

  Roger’s family, in league with the rest of Bloomsbury, traps her into writing the dead painter’s biography. Virginia resists, then acquiesces, and we can only think bitterly of the pack that makes her waste her powers on such useless labor. She feels hounded by those who had known Fry, who seem to be reading over her shoulder; nervously she watches herself confronting her “hero,” whose schizophrenic wife was institutionalized shortly after their marriage and spent the rest of her life that way. Virginia struggles under Roger Fry’s voluminous papers, articles, bills, manuscripts, agendas, under the letters he wrote and received, among them intimate exchanges with Nessa … who advises her sister to publish all of it and adds, “I hope you wont mind making us all blush.”9 But Virginia refuses to mention anything that involves lovers, Roger’s private life; so many things must not be said, or only alluded to. A process of censorship.

  And martyrdom above all. “An experiment in self suppression,” she complains. And it’s true!10 A serious one. She persists, entrenched in it since before the war; it will take two years. Two wasted years. The book will be uninteresting.

  One Sunday in March 1940, during a walk in the fields around Rodmell, Leonard, who has just read the proofs, criticizes Virginia’s work for the first and only time, and violently. It is the editor who speaks, but it is the wife who suffers: “It was like being pecked by a very hard strong beak. The more he pecked the deeper, as always happens. At last he was almost angry that I’d chosen ‘what seems to me the wrong method. Its merely anal[ysis], not history. Austere repression. In fact dull to the outside. All those dead quotations.’”11 He’s right, despite his blows from such a cruel—and virile—beak.

  But no matter, since, reading it, Vanessa breaks down in tears over the life of her former lover, forever her dear friend: “I’m crying cant thank you.” And Virginia, ecstatic: “Lord to have given back Nessa her Roger….”12

  But that isn’t all. Virginia had played with taking Roger from Nessa, and through this dead man, we see her return to the time when she stole Clive from her sister. Her discomfort with Roger Fry’s memory, her rejection of his emotions and private life, stem in part from her fantasies about him and herself. No doubt she once envied his passionate love for Vanessa, who, once burned and distrustful, had kept her lover as far from her sister as possible. Perhaps he is still too much alive for her to reveal herself publicly, to show any sign of her distress.

  And suddenly: “What a curious relation is mine with Roger at this moment—I who have given him a kind of shape after his death.” The shape of a ghost to carry within and fulfill her: “I feel very much in his presence at the moment; as if I were intimately connected with him; as if we together had given birth to this vision of him: a child born of us.”13

  That deeply rooted frustration, those vain cries and hopes through the years! Only a phantom to answer them, who doesn’t have the power to refuse that birth, or perhaps the embrace, the union that preceded it. “He had no power to alter it. And yet for some years it will represent him.”14 As Leonard’s children would have represented him had he not refused them. Or as Clive’s children represent him, born of Vanessa. As this child conceived with Vanessa’s lover represents Roger Fry.

  An ongoing obsession, children, now paired with the ever-present obsession of the war, which reawakens in her Septimus’s awareness that “millions lamented; for ages they had sorrowed,” and now they are more real than ever. Obsession with her confinement at Rodmell under bombardment: the planes coming every day, flying so close. Every evening, waiting to hear where the bombs drop. “If it doesn’t kill me its killing someone else,” writes Virginia.15

  When Leonard thinks it’s too risky to cross the garden, they lie flat on their bellies under a tree. “Don’t close yr teeth,” he advises Virginia. Each evening the Nazi planes threaten, but each evening they spend bowling, Virginia’s passion, and she imagines a prosaic and peaceful death mid-game on a lovely summer evening. The planes swoop over the villages; you can see their swastikas. Vita telephones from Sissinghurst, frantic as the bombs drop around her house: “Can you hear that? … Thats another. Thats another.” Virginia listens horrified to the voice of a friend who could be killed while talking to her—pressure, horror, danger, she concludes.16

  Spluttering, whistling, the sound of something like a saw overhead, raids every night, death held in suspense, and for Virginia, the frantic desire to survive:

  Last night a great heavy plunge of bomb under the window. So near we both started…. I said to L.: I don’t want to die yet. The chances are against it…. Oh I try to imagine how one’s killed by a bomb. I’ve got it fairly vivid—the sensation: but cant see anything but suffocating nonentity following aft
er. I shall think—oh I wanted another ten years—not this—& shant, for once, be able to describe it. It—I mean death; no, the scrunching & scrambling, the crushing of my bone shade in on my very active eye & brain: the process of putting out the light,—painful? Yes. Terrifying. I suppose so—then a swoon; a drum, two or three gulps attempting consciousness—& then, dot dot dot.17

  But worse than the bombs, the past is going to swoop down on her, the past of Hyde Park Gate, inexorable, its path cleared by her disbanded circle of friends, the many missing, sometimes frivolous diversions that kept her occupied or allowed her to channel the memory and sublimate it into her work.

  Leonard doesn’t compensate for those absences. On the contrary. They know how to live together, but their lives run parallel and never meet. Privately, they have constructed a kind of mutual, harmonious existence. But Virginia’s character cannot confide in Leonard’s, as she confides in Vanessa, Ethel, many of her other friends. And Leonard cannot confide in anyone since the years in Ceylon.