Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

by Viviane Forrester

  Each is grounded in an adjacent but self-contained world: “L. saw a grey heraldic bird: I only saw my thoughts.”18

  He is always judging her according to the same criteria. In his eyes, Virginia is continually threatened by madness, a madwoman under reprieve, renowned, a partner he’s used to. He has himself suffered from so many tacit judgments because of his family’s social status, his Judaism.

  He remains calm, fairly withdrawn. Even if he writes articles, political essays, gives lectures, participates in antifascist activities, and, as a journalist, holds important positions, even if he still directs the Hogarth Press, he lives at Rodmell for the present and devotes himself mostly to raising his dogs, tending his garden; in his autobiography he proudly remembers one afternoon, as he was planting irises, Virginia called to him from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech,” and in answer he shouted: “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.”19 And then, noting in his memoir that they are still flowering twenty-one years after Hitler’s suicide, he does not mention the twenty-five years since Virginia’s.

  Virginia enjoys periods of remission, like that day “almost too—I wont say happy: but amenable. The tune varies, from one nice melody to another. All is played (today) in such a theatre. Hills & fields; I cant stop looking.” She savors it: “One things ‘pleasant’ after another: breakfast, writing, walking, tea, bowls, reading, sweets, bed…. The globe rounds again. Behind it—oh yes.”20

  Already quite despondent in November 1940, she nevertheless writes to Vita: “Look, Vita … You must come here instantly. Not to see me. To see the flood. A bomb burst the Banks. We are so lovely—all sea, up to the gate. I’ve never seen anything more visionary lovely than Caburn upside down in the water.”21 She has twenty ideas for books all buzzing around in her head.

  At the start of the war, she is not just writing two works, Roger Fry and Between the Acts; as we have seen, she is also working on a third, which will become A Sketch of the Past well after her death. We have seen it open the floodgates for disturbing, devastating memories, allowing us to know Virginia Stephen better. And we have seen Virginia Woolf tormented by her own memory, transcribing the cruelty, placing side by side the reality of the present war with the disasters of a bygone childhood, its destructive griefs, its perverse aftermaths. The personal horror inscribed in the general horror.

  Virginia revels in these memories erupting in their terrible freshness; she undoubtedly thinks she can rid herself of them by writing them out. But, once invoked, the ghosts will claim her and won’t let go. In particular, the ghost of her father.

  She can’t talk about her family to Leonard, hurt by his wife’s snobbery with regard to the Woolfs and jealous of the endless attention she lavishes on the Bells, their importance to her, which he considers excessive. The two sisters often joked about his occasional reluctance to visit Charleston and his bitterness “imagining,” according to them, Virginia’s preference for the Bells over the Woolfs. Which was hardly “imagined,” and they knew that very well….

  At present, Leonard is not, cannot be, aware of what is going to transpire and is content with supervising his wife’s diet and activities, reassured by Rodmell’s isolation and calm, which for her, on the contrary, will prove fatal.

  She is still a passionate conversationalist, but encounters and gatherings are rare. There’s a party for Angelica at Charleston, where a meeting of the Memoir Club will take place. There are letters. Virginia receives a long letter from Benedict, or rather from Ben Nicolson, twenty-seven years old, one of Vita’s sons. He criticizes Bloomsbury’s elitism, the importance given to their poets, who should have been political activists and gotten involved. She answers with an even longer letter and remarks:

  Aren’t you taking what you call “Bloomsbury” much too seriously? … What puzzles me is that people who had infinitely greater gifts than any of us had—I mean Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge and so on—were unable to influence society. They didn’t have anything like the influence they should have had upon 19th century politics. And so we drifted into imperialism and all the other horrors that led to 1914. Would they have had more influence if they had taken an active part in politics? Or would they only have written worse poems?22

  Thinking is in itself political. As ever, Virginia devotes herself to her work: “Thinking is my fighting.”23

  For a time she works on all three projects at once; one of them will reach the very core of presence, our presence, in a world that remains indifferent to us. “They were all caught and caged; prisoners; watching a spectacle. Nothing happened.”24

  She does not “reach” that core: she is there.

  It is Between the Acts.

  Leonard read the finished manuscript, without reading the signs indicating where Virginia was then, or found herself: on the verge of departure…. But it was already so late, and it’s easy to say this long after the fact, knowing what happened next. Virginia herself was taking delight in writing what she drew from within, neither analyzing nor decoding it. Not writing in the first person no doubt let her extract but also extricate herself from what haunted her, fatally—by distributing it among the characters she created; by making other players act it out, by transcribing it in living signs throughout her pages.

  So there is Isa, with an unquenchable desire for water throughout the book, who wonders: “‘What wish should I drop into the well?’ … ‘that the waters should cover me … of the wishing well.’” And there is a pond about which we are told for no reason that “it was in that deep centre, in that black heart, that the lady had drowned herself.” And again, when the time punctually announces itself for Isa: “The church bells always stopped, leaving you to ask: Won’t there be another note? Isa, half-way across the lawn, listened…. Ding, dong, ding…. There was not going to be another note.” And Isa remarks that the show given near her manor by the villagers had drawn a larger crowd than in other years, “but then last year it rained,” and she murmurs: “This year, last year, next year, never,” and repeats it later in the evening.25

  Meanwhile, outside, the performance over, the audience mingling, and the actors scattered, Miss LaTrobe, the author, experiences a fleeting moment of fulfillment: “You have taken my gift! Glory possessed her—for one moment … her gift meant nothing. If they had understood her meaning; if they had known their parts…. ‘A failure,’ she groaned.” She leans against a tree and looks at the ground, which is nothing more than ground, not some remarkable territory. “This is death, death, death, death, she noted in the margin of her mind; when illusion fails.”26

  And Miss LaTrobe, the creator, the sot, the marginalized lesbian, takes refuge in a bar, its hubbub, the smell of rancid beer. “What she wanted … was the darkness in the mud; a whisky and soda at the pub; and coarse words descending like maggots through the waters.” When she gets her drink, “she raised her glass to her lips. And drank. And listened. Words of one syllable sank down into the mud. She drowsed; she nodded…. Words without meaning—wonderful words.”27

  The words for the next performance. Issued from the mud at the bottom of the water.

  That fascinating clear or muddy water with its menacing charms, which runs through all the work, the letters, the diary of Virginia. The water that Julia, her mother, “exhausted swimmer,” would never manage to cross. The water that Virginia asks to be left “to go deeper and deeper in” in Moments of Being. Also the water of the great lake of melancholy: “And so I pitched into my great lake of melancholy. Lord how deep it is! … The only way I keep afloat is by working…. Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down. And as usual, I feel that if I sink further I shall reach the truth.” Unless she lets herself slip “tranquilly off into the deep water of my own thoughts navigating the underworld,” or into “some continuous stream, not solely of human thought, but of the ship, the night &c, all flowing together.”28

  A never-ending metaphor. In 1931, ten
years before drowning herself, she wrote to John Lehmann: “If I live another 50 years I think I shall put this method to some use, but in 50 years I shall be under the pond, with the gold fish swimming over me.” In 1925, she wrote to Gerald Brenan that “one ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.” There are countless examples, forever pointing to the River Ouse.29

  But, just as alarming, the mountains are now emerging and with them, the specter of Leslie. Solitude with Leonard, the solitude of Rodmell, authorizes the past to haunt Virginia, without the former safeguard of a dazzling, public, and abundantly full life; of an audience and an array of activities that formed a barrier against certain obsessions.

  With no more barriers, the grief of the past descends upon her, in the present; suffering never extinguished nor even wholly realized. The enigma of what “was impossible to say aloud” assails her and remains forever forbidden: the suspicions of incest regarding the father.30 Hyde Park Gate returns, morbid, corrupted. And more immediately, there is the war.

  “I plunged into the past this morning; wrote about father.”31 She goes through his papers, rereads his books, renews her love for him; but above all, she advances alone into the harrowing account of what she hides within, unleashing the most disturbed, least healthy part of herself, which pours forth in this steadily deteriorating time of war, asphyxiation awaiting her in the garage, or morphine: the suicide planned by Leonard in case of defeat, which she dreads.

  “How beautiful they were, those old people—” she marvels, lost in the letters of her parents, which she sees free of “mud” … whereas at the same time she describes the suspect atmosphere surrounding them, evoking or insinuating the ambiguous discomfort, the libidinous cloud around Leslie Stephen, widowed.32

  Throughout the diary, mention of the father, or even of mountains, which symbolize him, often anticipates a depressive episode. Symptoms are usually mentioned within a few pages of such allusions.

  At the moment, Leslie is never far away. Remember that she wrote, “[I] turn toward my father,” upon learning of a war-related disaster. On a March day in 1940, trying to overcome her depression, Virginia takes heart, as she often does, in making plans: she will take books around to the bookstores with Leonard; they will have tea, window shop at antique stores; there will be beautiful farms, green lawns; she will bowl, buy a notebook, rearrange the furniture in her room, occasionally make a cake, write a book of prose poetry. “For in Gods name I’ve done my share, with pen & talk, for the human race. I mean young writers can stand on their own feet. Yes, I deserve a spring—I owe nobody nothing.” And as the primary cure she adds, “Now being drowned by the flow of running water, I will read Whymper till lunch time.”33

  Water. But also, going by the name of Whymper, the mountain. Edward Whymper: the first alpinist to scale Mont Cervin (the Matterhorn), a climb that caused a scandal: four members of the roped party, among them Oscar Wilde’s brother, died there, falling into a crevasse. Whymper was suspected of cutting the rope to save his own life. Most importantly, Whymper’s is a world of glaciers, summits, peaks, alpenstocks, guides … and suspicion.

  “I plunged into the past,” and for her next book, Virginia thinks of “taking my mountain top—that persistent vision—as a starting point.” Which requires the presence of a ghost, her father.34

  Twenty-eight days before her suicide, on the back of a rough draft of Between the Acts, she will write a short sketch: “The Symbol.”35

  And the symbol is a mountain.

  A woman seated on a hotel balcony … facing the mountain writes: “The mountain is a symbol.” She looks through binoculars at “the virgin height” that the first version (crossed out) describes as “a menace: something cleft in the mind like two parts of a broken disk: two numbers: two numbers that cannot be added: a problem that is insoluble.”36

  Today she has the impression of having observed the mountain as she stared at her mother in her death throes, succumbing to cancer, and she recalls having been impatient for her to come to the end of it, wishing her dead in order to be free, to be able to marry. Virginia, beside Leslie, had suffered the same impatience.

  But the mountain, complains the woman, the mountain “never moves … it would need an earthquake to destroy that mountain.” Since the symbol mountain can’t be removed, this woman, this girl, in “the most absurd dreams,” aspires to climb it, no doubt reaching its summit: “If I could get there, I should be happy to die. I think there, in the crater … I should find the answer.” The peak. The crater. The cavity. The mountain also contains a place to pitch oneself, like the “great lake of melancholy”—to reach the truth, or because of course there is none.37

  Virginia has already wondered “if shadows could die, and how one buried them.”38 But, like the mountain once hidden by clouds, they are not gone. They are there, all around. Leslie, and Stella, and Thoby avoiding saying Stella’s name after her death, Stella, the name of a ship that had just sunk; and Thoby dead, and Virginia and Adrian deciding together to repeat his name often; and the elusive Julia, her corpse and Dr. Seton and Jack Hill and St. Ives, and … Laura, and even Roger, now surround Virginia Woolf, who yields to them and staggers, spellbound.

  Leonard doesn’t see her succumb, alone, adrift; he doesn’t see her letting herself be sucked in by the lines she draws. For him, it’s normal to find her scrubbing floors to ease her anxiety. He doesn’t see her languish, isolated with him, cut off from her circle. On the contrary, he insists on maintaining the calm and isolation forced upon them by the war.

  It was Leonard, the pillar, the rock, who proposed, if necessary, their joint suicide. “All the walls, the protecting & reflecting walls, wear so terribly thin in this war.”39

  He doesn’t see her, only watches over her, holding to his old theories; the liturgical glass of milk remains a part of their routine. She has no support. Leonard pursues the life that she made possible for him, that he’s good at, that fulfills him, and that he has pursued faithfully at her side, at a propitious distance until now. But now he no longer sees her, seems tired of her.

  And then … and then … Virginia Woolf’s prestige no longer protects her, without the publicity, without the audience, or at least the perceived audience, she had before. It has dispersed, the circle that allowed the brilliant woman to sparkle (under Leonard’s reproving but impressed gaze) and to assert herself, to command everyone’s respect, safeguarded by them. The rampart of the public, of Bloomsbury, has disappeared. She is alone with her husband and seems to blur in his eyes. In a sense, she is mastered; no more escapades at Ottoline Morrell’s or other thrilling scenes, no more circle of friends who heighten her successes. Who keep her in focus.

  More than anyone else, Leonard recognizes the value of the work. But for him it’s the product of his wife’s “genius,” and since he links genius to madness, that work doesn’t protect her.

  The unthinkable: in January 1941, Harper’s Bazaar returns to Virginia Woolf a short story they had commissioned from her. Rejected. “A battle against depression, rejection (by Harper’s of my story & Ellen Terry) routed today (I hope) by clearing out kitchen; by sending an article (a lame one) to N.S. [New Statesman]: & by breaking into PH40 2 days, I think, of memoir writing. This trough of despair shall not, I swear, engulf me. The solitude is great.” And even now, words she will repeat to Leonard in three months’ time: “We live without a future … our noses pressed to a closed door.”41

  The solitude is great….

  A visit to Cambridge in February slightly relieves the despondency, the pervasive sadness. “[It] felt as if we’d had a hot bath—it was so clean warm and civilised.” Virginia is ecstatic, and that speaks volumes about what Rodmell has become for her. She thanks one of her hosts for the “extraordinarily happy evening you gave us…. It remains like an oasis, last Wednesday, not a mirage—in the desert.”42

  Returning to that “desert,” she loses her footing again. As the months go by, her distress
becomes increasingly perceptible, the isolation desolate. Around others, she bears up well, her gaiety restored for those ever rarer encounters or in her letters, as when she thanks Vita for her gift of butter, then so precious: “Please congratulate the cows from me, and the dairy maid, and I would like to suggest that the calf should be known in the future (if it’s a man) as Leonard if a woman as Virginia.”43

  She continues to write to Ethel Smyth, at length, confiding in her as never before. March 1, 1941—by March 28 Virginia Woolf will be dead: “Do you feel, as I do, when my head’s not this impossible grindstone, that this is the worst stage of the war? I do. I was saying to Leonard, we have no future. He says that’s what gives him hope. He says the necessity of some catastrophe pricks him up.”44

  Difficult to follow the exchange. But where does Leonard’s response come from? Why this hope in the absence of a future, a future Virginia refutes? What is the “necessary catastrophe” that seems inevitable—and exciting—to him? Is he just expressing his attitude toward the war, or has something unconscious escaped here?

  In four weeks’ time, Virginia will drown herself.

  Octavia Wilberforce entered the scene a few months earlier; Octavia, whose role in this disaster has not been examined.

  Octavia Wilberforce, a doctor, a pioneer in that profession in her youth. A former suffragette. Some sort of distant cousin to Virginia. The lover of an old actress, Elizabeth Robins, who remembered a “vicious” Julia and lived for some time in the United States.45 Octavia has a practice at Brighton, where she attends Virginia.

  A decent enough woman, Octavia Wilberforce. Leon Edel, who knew her a bit later, describes her as “robust and round-faced”; “literature was obviously a mystery to her.” She occupied herself with medicine and animal husbandry. The last time he saw her, “she sat on her little tractor and meandered triumphantly through the pastures, ruling her bovine empire and wearing her little crown of artificial flowers on her off-the-face hat.”46