Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

by Viviane Forrester

  But Virginia, so alone now, throws herself upon her, a woman six years her junior who treats her almost like a child. A pathetic, emaciated Virginia. An Octavia petrified by the great writer to whom Elizabeth Robins has already introduced her, terrified of not being equal to the task, although at each visit, Virginia begs her to stay.

  An Octavia Wilberforce who, like Leonard, provides milk! Her power over the couple: each week when she comes for tea, she brings them milk and cream from her cows. Virginia soon nicknames her “leech Octavia,” but she’s the one who begs for the leech’s presence. “I rather think I’ve a new lover,” she writes in fun to Ethel and especially to Vita, “a doctor, a Wilberforce, a cousin.” Above all, someone to hang onto.47

  She hardly mentions her in her diary or elsewhere in her letters; she writes a few letters to Octavia, and the opening of one of them is inauspicious: “You’ve reduced me not to silence quite, but to a kind of splutter.”48 With gratitude this time for the products of the Devonshire cows. Octavia then proposes a trade: for the milk, a book.

  A book in exchange for milk. Milk, forever the obstacle in Virginia’s path.

  Milk, even Devonshire milk, is hardly fair trade for a book, Octavia continues, albeit unconvinced. And Virginia: “I never heard of a more absurd ‘business proposition’ as you call it. A month’s milk and cream in return for an unborn and as far as I can tell completely worthless book.” And this cry: “I’ve lost all power over words, cant do a thing with them.” Which she doesn’t write anywhere else, and which is inaccurate. But the injury, the terror are not.49

  She proposes apples instead of a book and goes on: “I cant, as you see, make my hand cease to tremble.”50 Her hands at present are always icy, stalactites, says Octavia, who sometimes takes them into her own while she repeats idiotic theories comparing mental suffering to appendicitis.

  And it is Virginia’s right hand that trembles continuously now, like Leonard’s.

  Virginia lets herself go a little around this woman whom she dominates, who doesn’t not really count, but serves as a lifeline—and who is tortured by her inability to help the writer for whom Devonshire milk, she confesses, doesn’t seem to do much good. “Don’t go yet,” is Virginia’s refrain, who insists: “You don’t know how much I need it.”51

  Leonard sometimes takes tea with them and returns to his work, despite his wife’s attempts to retain him as well. Alone with Octavia, Virginia can then speak of Leslie, whose love letters to his wife she is classifying, enraptured. “Poor Leonard is tired out by my interest in my family and all it brings back.” And Wilberforce listens as she spills the thousand versions of that fixation with a father who, Virginia repeats to her, leaned too heavily on his children at the death of their mother, demanded too much emotionally from them, ruined her life and, she says, deadened her physical responses. She reevaluates what she wrote elsewhere. Octavia understands what she can of it, strangely convinced that George Duckworth was evidently adored by his half-sister. “Did you know him?” she asks Elizabeth Robins.52

  Virginia Woolf is at her wit’s end, jumpy, thin as “a razor,” with no one to turn to but this powerless woman who listens to her, rarely understands her, and despairs at not being able to “save” her.53

  She feels useless. The village doesn’t even want her for night watches during air raids, though they asked Leonard. She can no longer work for long stretches, never after tea. When she is too desperate, she goes to the kitchen to make cakes.

  Miss Robins is able to start writing again thanks to a letter from Virginia. She cables Octavia, “Virginia’s letter sets me to work again.” Delighted to hear the news, Virginia asks Octavia excitedly to “Say it again!” And when Octavia obeys: “Yes, but tell me again the exact words.”54

  Octavia’s last visit, March 21, and Virginia, as always: “Don’t go yet,” and Octavia torn, because a patient is waiting. Virginia asks her if she can give her something to do…. Catalogue her library? Flattered, considering it sufficient to “buck up” Virginia, Wilberforce repeats her refrain: “there’s nobody in England I’d like, adore more to help.” Which sounds laughable … but she is the only one who can say that.55

  Leonard worries about his wife much less now than he did before, when she was doing fine. Now he no longer notices her. Nothing in Virginia’s behavior corresponds to the list of red flags he has established, calls for “tak[ing] steps” he considers panaceas: drinking milk, eating better, getting more sleep, insignificant remedies amounting to superstitions.56

  As always, he justifies himself in his memoir: he began to worry toward the end of January; Virginia was doing better until then. Her depression stemmed from completing Between the Acts: the fatigue, having cut “the umbilical cord” and sent the manuscript to the printer.57 The breakdown occurred suddenly, without warning, according to him.

  She has hung on for months. Now she starts losing ground. During the first half of March, Virginia returns from a walk soaked, distraught; she claims to have slipped in a stream. No doubt a first attempt. But no one to rally around her. Leonard, terrified, seems to withdraw still further. Wilberforce is upset, of course, but mainly because the writer’s fame intimidates her and she’s afraid of making a bad impression. The others have dispersed. Virginia struggles alone.

  Alone? Not completely. Vanessa pays her a visit on March 20; upset, genuinely worried, she writes to her immediately upon returning to Charleston. A lethal letter. Which could have arisen instinctively from the old dispute, now closed. Or from stupidity.

  With this letter she would have the last word. In it we can also hear how the one who falters is discredited. “Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you.”58

  Vanessa: “You must be sensible. Which means you must accept the fact that Leonard and I can judge better than you can…. You’re in the state when one never admits what’s the matter—but you must not go and get ill just now. What shall we do when we’re invaded if you are a helpless invalid—”59 The death blow.

  She adds that both she and Leonard (as opposed, that is, to Virginia) have always had reputations for good sense and honesty. So her sister must “believe in” them.60

  But what is there to believe in, which she is rejecting? Leonard has nothing to offer. He is always talking of “tak[ing] steps,” but goes in circles, not knowing what those measures are.61 In any case, it’s too late now, but he never considered asking Virginia, talking to her, listening to her. For him, his wife’s difficulties are physical in nature, and he considers her to inhabit a different sphere from his when she becomes sick. There’s no question of exchange or understanding, only of authority. He digs in his heels, alone, powerless, clueless, superior, dominant: Virginia’s only chance, he insists, is to yield.

  Yield to what? He must convince her that she’s very sick. Increase her anxiety about her condition, terrify her. Corner her. And make her drink milk.

  On February 25, she accompanied him to Brighton again, where he was giving a talk. In the restroom at the Sussex Grill, “p—ing as quietly as I could,” she listens to the women chatting as they powder their faces, and a short story takes shape, the last one after the mountain-symbol story, this time about a coastal town that reeks of fish, even in the restrooms.62

  In a Brighton bakery, she observes, horrified, a fat woman with her “large white muffin face,” heavily made-up old women stuffing themselves: “something scented, shoddy, parasitic about them. Then they toted up cakes…. Where does the money come from to feed these fat white slugs? Brighton a love corner for slugs.” And then in Rodmell, “infernal boredom.”63

  The journal is silent until March 8, and then Brighton again, “shell encrusted old women, rouged, decked, cadaverous at the tea shop,” and then immediately a jump; Virginia Woolf defends herself: “No: I intend no introspection. I mark Henry James’s sentence: Observe perpetually. Observe the oncome of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable. Or I hope so. I in
sist upon spending this time to the best advantage. I will go down with my colours flying.”64

  A final entry in the diary, March 24, four days before going down. She observed much, with great care, and begins: “She had a nose like the Duke of Wellington & great horse teeth & cold prominent eyes. When we came in she was sitting perched on a 3 cornered chair with knitting in her hands. An arrow fastened her collar … two of her sons had been killed in the war. This, one felt, was to her credit…. I tried to coin a few compliments. But they perished in the icy sea between us. And then there was nothing.”65

  Nevertheless, a few more lines: “This windy corner. And Nessa is at Brighton, & I am imagining how it wd be if we could infuse souls.”66

  She makes dates for April with Tom Eliot, Ethel Smyth; writes to Vita, whose parakeets are dying in great numbers: “If we come over [to Sissinghurst], may I bring her [Louie, the housekeeper] a pair if any survive? Do they die all in an instant? When shall we come? Lord knows—”67

  She writes to John Lehmann. He has just read the manuscript of Between the Acts, to mediate between Leonard, who is enthusiastic, and Virginia, who no longer believes in it. He sides passionately with Leonard. They decide on its publication, but Virginia protests: “Dear John, I’d decided, before your letter came, that I cant publish that novel as it stands—its too silly and trivial.” She plans to revise it, to see if she can make something of it; she had not realized that it was so bad. And she humbly apologizes, apologizes again “profoundly” to John Lehmann.68

  So many mental, physical, cerebral, technical “acts” required by her work over so long a time … she had come so far, she was exhausted. And all that time having also borne the burden of living, just existence itself.

  There is no writer, no authentic thinker, who is not burdened with bitter knowledge: the eternally unknown language of the world in which we are the actors in our own disappearances.

  Virginia Woolf had acquired yet another kind of knowledge: the ability to capture what whispers within the silence. There’s great danger in saying, even through old Lucy Swithin, that “we haven’t the words—we haven’t the words.”69

  And on March 27 Leonard is more frightened than ever, finding “the terrifying decision which I had to take then once more faced me. It was essential for her to resign herself to illness and the drastic regime which alone could stave off insanity.” That tedious regime: milk, food, sleep! But above all, “I had to urge her to face the verge of disaster in order to get her to accept the misery of the only method of avoiding it.” Her only chance, once again, is to yield.70

  Urgently he turns to Octavia Wilberforce, who—although there’s no proof of her competence, especially in this area—impresses him just as George Duckworth once did. “A remarkable character. Her ancestors were the famous Wilberforces of the anti-slavery movement; their portraits hung on her walls…. She was large, strong, solid, slow growing, completely reliable, like an English oak. Her roots were in English history and the English soil of Sussex.”71 What better proof!

  She is also a timid woman, not very intelligent; an unassertive, compliant doctor.

  She is in bed, very sick with the flu and a bad fever, and the telephone rings: Leonard, in a panic, is calling for her help. She is too sick, can’t come; he begs her to see them. He adds that Virginia doesn’t want to see her. Later he will write that together they had agreed upon this visit.

  And it is a horror.

  The women spoke together, he writes, had a conversation. No. He gave Wilberforce control; she accepted and suddenly took herself very seriously. Here is Virginia, Virginia Woolf, dragged against her will to an incompetent doctor, humiliated before the woman who had supported her, who had been proud to know her; she sees herself at Octavia’s mercy. And she is. Quite pleased with herself, Octavia Wilberforce plays doctor. She forgets her cough: a battle is under way, “a battle of—not wits but minds,” she dares to call it.72

  That great mind is indignant. Virginia Woolf seems to resist her questions: “[she] wouldn’t answer my questions frankly … and was generally resistive.” So Wilberforce treats her as though she were lying, or at least “gently and firmly [I] told her that I knew her answer wasn’t true”; whatever the true answer is, she thinks Virginia Woolf is withholding it.

  She orders her to undress, which serves no purpose in this instance. As though “sleep-walking,” Virginia obeys, then stops and asks Octavia to promise not to order her a rest cure. Octavia answers evasively and the examination continues. Virginia resists at each step, “like a petulant child.”73

  “God knows if I did her a penn’orth of good,” confesses the stupid Octavia to Elizabeth. She took Virginia’s ice-cold hands in her own, reaffirmed that, in all of England, Virginia was the person she’d like most to help, but Virginia must “collaborate.” “All you have to do is to reassure Leonard,” she concludes. Whom she joins in the next room, leaving Virginia alone to wait while they discuss her.74

  This is Virginia Woolf, the writer. She is not allowed to speak. Papa, Mama are taking charge of her. “Once you fall….”75

  While she is waiting docilely in her corner, a plane rumbles over, a loud din above the roof; bombs explode nearby. Absorbed in their conversation, Wilberforce and Leonard take no notice. It’s only on the drive home that Leonard will remember and make note of it. But Virginia, left alone, offended, waiting by herself while bombs are dropping? Laboriously, Wilberforce arrives at “her” prescription: Virginia is not to work for a certain amount of time, Virginia consumes too many books. Rationed, she will be fine.

  All that for only that.

  Leonard is satisfied. Returning home with Virginia, he hopes that the words of Wilberforce, “the oak,” have had some effect on her.76

  They have. The next day she will drown herself.

  The last person to see her is Louie Maier, the housekeeper.

  The morning of March 28, Leonard brings her Virginia, who is not doing well: “‘Louie, will you give Mrs Woolf a duster so that she can help you clean the room?’ I gave her a duster, but it seemed very strange. I had never known her want to do any housework with me before.”77

  And Louie taught the writer, terrified by the idea of no longer being able to write books, how to clean them. (I watched her repeat that epic lesson for a film. Majestically, slowly and solemnly, she opened, shook out, flapped and closed each volume.) “After a while Mrs Woolf put the duster down and went away. I thought that probably she did not like cleaning the study and had decided to do something else.”78 Yes, exactly.

  To get from Monk’s House to the River Ouse, you must first cross through a romantic, lopsided cemetery adjacent to the garden. Then comes a long path leading through a bare, very flat landscape offering no reference points or recourse. You must be very determined, as Virginia was. Forget Ophelia with her wreath of flowers, even if she too was led “from her melodious lay/to muddy death.”79 There’s nothing pastoral about the River Ouse; it runs through an industrial district. It’s a setting out of Zola, where the desperate come from the surrounded villages to commit suicide.

  Virginia left three letters. One to Vanessa, thanking her for hers! Two testimonials for Leonard, written a few days apart. One of them prior to her first attempt, perhaps. She confirms that she’s hearing voices again, that she’s afraid of being mad forever and that he has been perfect for her. She repeats what Rachel says to her fiancé in The Voyage Out, even though they obviously never managed to love each other: “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.” Leonard will be better without her: “I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work.” He has been so patient with her, done all that could be done. And she adds each time … “everybody knows it.”80

  What was Virginia Woolf denied? Respect.

  As were Vincent Van Gogh and Antonin Artaud, Gérard de Nerval and Giordano Bruno, Friedrich Nietzsche and Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire as well, so many others, Camille Claudel…. Many of t
hem, judging themselves through the eyes of others, found themselves guilty and took their own lives.

  They remain, “colours flying.”81

  A few months before sinking into the River Ouse, her pockets weighted with stones, Virginia Woolf wrote: “All frost. Still frost. Burning white…. What is that phrase I always remember—or forget. Look your last on all things lovely.”82

  ABBREVIATIONS

  Works by Virginia Woolf

  BA Between the Acts. New York: Harcourt, 1941.

  CSF The Complete Shorter Fiction. Ed. Susan Dick. Orlando: Harcourt, 1989.

  D.i-v The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1915–1941. Vol. 1–5. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977–84.

  MB Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. San Diego: Harcourt, 1985.

  MD Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando: Harcourt, 1925.

  O Orlando. San Diego: Harcourt, 1928.

  PA A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals: 1897–1909. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. London: Hogarth Press, 1990.

  TG Three Guineas. New York: Harcourt, 1938.

  TL To the Lighthouse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

  VO The Voyage Out. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.

  W The Waves. Orlando: Harcourt, 1931.

  Y The Years. London: Hogarth Press, 1951.

  Supplementary Works

  HL Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Chatto & Windus, 1996.

  LW.i Woolf, Leonard. Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880–1904. London: Hogarth Press, 1960.

  LW.ii Woolf, Leonard. Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904–1911. London: Hogarth Press, 1970.

  LW.iii Woolf, Leonard. Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911–1918. London: Hogarth Press, 1964.

  LW.iv Woolf, Leonard. Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919–1939. London: Hogarth Press, 1968.