Art and Ardor

by Cynthia Ozick

  That he coveted the one while requiring the other was—certainly in her biographer’s eyes—the salvation of Virginia. No one else in that milieu could have survived—surely not as husband—her illnesses. Roger Fry, for instance, put his own mad wife away and went to live with Vanessa. As for Lamb, Waterlow, Young—viewed in the light of what Virginia Woolf’s insanity extracted from her caretaker, their possibilities wither. Of all her potential husbands, only Leonard Woolf emerged as fit. And the opposite too can be said: of Bloomsbury’s potential wives, only Virginia emerged as fit for Leonard. He was fit for her because her madness, especially in combination with her innovative genius, demanded the most grave, minutely persevering and attentive service. She was fit for him not simply because she represented Bloomsbury in its most resplendent flowering of originality and luminousness; so, after all, did Vanessa, an accomplished painter active with other painters in the revolutionary vitality of the Post-Impressionists. But just as no marriage could survive Vanessa for long, so Leonard married to Vanessa would not have survived Bloomsbury for long. What Leonard needed in Virginia was not so much her genius as her madness. It made possible for him the exercise of the one thing Bloomsbury had no use for: uxoriousness. It allowed him the totality of his seriousness unchecked. It used his seriousness, it gave it legitimate occupation, it made it both necessary and awesome. And it made her serious. Without the omnipresent threat of disintegration, freed from the oppression of continuous vigil against breakdown, what might Virginia’s life have been? The flirtation with Clive hints at it: she might have lived, at least outwardly, like Vanessa. It was his wife’s insanity, in short, that made tenable the permanent—the secure—presence in Bloomsbury of Leonard himself. Her madness fed his genius for responsibility; it became for him a corridor of access to her genius. The spirit of Bloomsbury was not Leonard’s, his temperament was against it—Bloomsbury could have done without him. So could a sane Virginia.

  The whole question of Virginia’s sexuality now came into Leonard’s hands. And here too he was curiously ambivalent. The honeymoon was not a success; they consulted Vanessa, Vanessa the sexual creature—when had she had her first orgasm? Vanessa could not remember. “No doubt,” she reflected, “I sympathised with such things if I didn’t have them from the time I was 2.” “Why do you think people make such a fuss about marriage & copulation?” Virginia was writing just then; “. . . certainly I find the climax immensely exaggerated.” Vanessa and Leonard put their heads together over it. Vanessa said she believed Virginia “never had understood or sympathised with sexual passion in men”; this news, she thought, “consoled” Leonard. For further consolation the two of them rehearsed (and this was before England had become properly aware of Freud) Virginia’s childhood trauma inflicted by her elder half-brother George Duckworth, who had, under cover of big-brotherly affection, repeatedly entered the nursery at night for intimate fondlings, the nature of which Virginia then hardly comprehended; she knew only that he frightened her and that she despised him. Apparently this explanation satisfied Leonard—the “consolation” worked—if rather too quickly; the ability to adjust speedily to disappointment is a good and useful trait in a colonial officer, less so in a husband. It does not contradict the uxorious temperament, however, and certainly not the nursing enterprise: a wife who is seen to be frigid as well as mad is simply taken for that much sicker. But too ready a reconcilement to bad news is also a kind of abandonment, and Leonard seems very early to have relinquished, or allowed Virginia to relinquish, the sexual gratifications of marriage. All the stranger since he repeatedly speaks of himself as “lustful.” And he is not known to have had so much as a dalliance during his marriage.

  On the other hand, Quentin Bell suggests—a little coyly, as if only blamelessly hinting—that Virginia Woolf’s erotic direction was perhaps toward women rather than men. The “perhaps” is crucial: the index to the first volume lists “passion for Madge Vaughan,” “passion for Violet Dickinson,” but the corresponding textual passages are all projections from the most ordinary sort of data. Madge Vaughan was a cousin by marriage whom Virginia knew from the age of seven; at sixteen she adored her still, and once stood in the house paralyzed by rapture, thinking, “Madge is here; at this moment she is actually under this roof”—an emotion, she once said, that she never equaled afterward. Many emotions at sixteen are never equaled afterward. Of Virginia’s intense letter-writing to Violet Dickinson—a friend of her dead half-sister—Quentin Bell says: “. . . it is clear to the modern reader, though it was not at all clear to Virginia, that she was in love and that her love was returned.” What is even clearer is that it is possible to be too “modern,” if that is what enables one to read a sensual character into every exuberant or sympathetic friendship between women. Vita Sackville-West, of course, whom Virginia Woolf knew when both writers were already celebrated, was an established sapphist, and was plainly in pursuit of Virginia. Virginia, she wrote, “dislikes the quality of masculinity,” but that was the view of one with a vested interest in believing it. As for Virginia, she “felt,” according to her biographer, “as a lover feels—she desponded when she fancied herself neglected, despaired when Vita was away, waited anxiously for letters, needed Vita’s company and lived in that strange mixture of elation and despair which lovers—and one would have supposed only lovers—can experience.” But all this is Quentin Bell. Virginia herself, reporting a three-day visit from Sackville-West, appears erotically detached: “These Sapphists love women; friendship is never untinged with amorosity. . . . I like her and being with her and the splendour—she shines in the grocer’s shop . . . with a candle lit radiance.” She acknowledged what she readily called Vita’s “glamour,” but the phrase “these Sapphists” is too mocking to be lover’s language. And she was quick to criticize Vita (who was married to Harold Nicolson) as a mother: “. . . she is a little cold and off-hand with her boys.” Virginia Woolf’s biographer nevertheless supposes—he admits all this is conjecture—“some caressing, some bedding together.” Still, in the heart of this love, if it was love, was the ultimate withdrawal: “In brain and insight,” Virginia remarked in her diary, “she is not as highly organised as I am.” Vita was splendid but “not reflective.” She wrote “with a pen of brass.” And: “I have no enormous opinion of her poetry.” Considering all of which, Quentin Bell notes persuasively that “she could not really love without feeling that she was in the presence of a superior intellect.” Sackville-West, for her part, insisted that not only did Virginia not like the quality of masculinity, but also the “possessiveness and love of domination in men.”

  Yet Leonard Woolf dominated Virginia Woolf overwhelmingly—nor did she resist—not so much because his braininess impressed her (his straightforwardly thumping writing style must have claimed her loyalty more than her admiration), but because he possessed her in the manner of—it must be said again—a strong-minded nurse with obsessive jurisdiction over a willful patient. The issue of Virginia Woolf’s tentative or potential lesbianism becomes reduced, at this point, to the merest footnote of possibility. Sackville-West called her “inviolable”; and the fact is she was conventionally married, and had conventional expectations of marriage. She wanted children. For a wedding present Violet Dickinson sent her a cradle. “My baby shall sleep in [it],” she said at thirty. But it stood empty, and she felt, all her life, the ache of the irretrievable. “I don’t like the physicalness of having children of my own,” she wrote at forty-five, recording how “the little creatures”—Vanessa’s children—“moved my infinitely sentimental throat.” But then, with a lurch of candor: “I can dramatise myself a parent, it is true. And perhaps I have killed the feeling instinctively; or perhaps nature does.” Two years after declaring the feeling killed, during a dinner party full of worldly conversation with the Webbs and assorted eminences, she found herself thinking: “L. and myself . . . the pathos, the symbolical quality of the childless couple.”

  The feeling was not killed; it had a remarkable
durability. There is no record of her response to the original decision not to have children. That decision was Leonard’s, and it was “medical.” He consulted three or four people variously qualified, including Vanessa’s doctor and the nurse who ran the home to which Virginia was sent when most dangerously disturbed (and to whom, according to Bell, Leonard ascribed “an unconscious but violent homosexual passion for Virginia”—which would, one imagines, make one wonder about the disinterestedness of her advice). Leonard also requested the opinion of Dr. George Savage, Virginia’s regular physician, whom he disliked, and was heartily urged to have babies; soon after we find him no longer in consultation with Dr. Savage. Bell tells us that “in the end Leonard decided and persuaded Virginia to agree that, although they both wanted children, it would be too dangerous for her to have them.” The “too dangerous” is left unexplained; we do not even know Leonard’s ostensible reason. Did he think she could not withstand pregnancy and delivery? She was neither especially frail nor without energy, and was a zealous walker, eight miles at a time, over both London and countryside; she hefted piles of books and packed them for the Hogarth Press; she had no organic impediments. Did he believe she could not have borne the duties of rearing? But in that class there was no household without its nanny (Vanessa had two), and just as she never had to do a housekeeping chore (she never laid a fire, or made a bed, or washed a sock), she need not have been obliged to take physical care of a child. Did he, then, fear an inherited trait—diseased offspring? Or did he intend to protect the phantom child from distress by preventing its birth into a baleful household? Or did he mean, out of some curious notion of intellectual purity, not to divide the strength of Virginia’s available sanity, to preserve her undistracted for her art?

  Whatever the reason, and to spare her—or himself—what pains we can only guess at, she was in this second instance released from “normality.” Normality is catch-as-catch-can. Leonard, in his deliberateness, in his responsibility, was more serious than that, and surrendered her to a program of omissions. She would be spared the tribulations both of the conjugal bed and of childbed. She need not learn ease in the one; she need not, no, must not, venture into the other. In forbidding Virginia maternity, Leonard abandoned her to an unparalleled and unslakable envy. Her diary again and again records the pangs she felt after visits with Vanessa’s little sons—pangs, defenses, justifications: she suffered. Nor was it a social suffering—she did not feel deprived of children because she was expected to. The name “Virginia Woolf” very soon acquired the same resonance for her contemporaries (“this celebrity business is quite chronic,” she wrote) as it has for us—after which she was expected to be only Virginia Woolf. She learned, after a while, to be only that (which did not, however, prevent her from being an adored and delightful aunt), and to mock at Vanessa’s mothering, and to call it obsessive and excessive. She suffered the envy of the childless for the fruitful, precisely this, and nothing societally imposed; and she even learned to transmute maternal envy into a more manageable variety—literary begrudging. This was directed at Vanessa’s second son, Julian Bell, killed in the Spanish Civil War, toward whose literary ambitions Virginia Woolf was always ungenerous, together with Leonard; a collection of Julian’s essays, prepared after his death, Leonard dubbed “Vanessa’s necrophily.” Vanessa-envy moved on into the second generation. It was at bottom a rivalry of creatureliness, in which Virginia was always the loser. Vanessa was on the side of “normality,” the placid mother of three, enjoying all the traditional bourgeois consolations; she was often referred to as a madonna; and at the same time she was a thorough-going bohemian. Virginia was anything but placid, yet lived a sober sensible domestic life in a marriage stable beyond imagining, with no trace of bohemianism. Vanessa the bohemian madonna had the best of both hearth-life and free life. Virginia was barred from both.

  Without the authoritative domestic role maternity would have supplied, with no one in the household dependent on her (for years she quarreled with her maid on equal or inferior terms), and finding herself always—as potential patient—in submission, Virginia Woolf was by degrees nudged into a position of severe dependency. It took odd forms: Leonard not only prescribed milk at eleven in the morning, but also topics for conversation in the evening. Lytton Strachey’s sister-in-law recalls how among friends Leonard would work up the “backbone” of a subject “and then be happy to let [Virginia] ornament it if she wanted to.” And he gave her pocket money every week. Her niece Angelica reports that “Leonard kept Virginia on very short purse-strings,” which she exercised through the pleasures of buying “coloured string and sealing-wax, notebooks and pencils.” When she came to the end of writing a book, she trembled until Leonard read it and gave his approval. William Plomer remembers how Leonard would grow alarmed if, watching Virginia closely, he saw her laugh a little too convulsively. And once she absent-mindedly began to flick bits of meat off her dinner plate; Leonard hushed the company and led her away.1

  —All of which has given Leonard his reputation for saintliness. A saint who successively secures acquiescence to frigidity, childlessness, dependency? Perhaps; probably; of course. These are, after all; conventual vows—celibacy, barrenness, obedience. But Leonard Woolf was a socialist, not an ascetic; he had a practical political intelligence; he was the author of books called Empire and Commerce in Africa and Socialism and Co-operation; he ran the Hogarth Press like a good businessman; at the same time he edited a monthly periodical, The International Review; he was literary editor of The Nation. He had exactly the kind of commonsensical temperament that scorns, and is repelled by, religious excess. And of Virginia he made a shrine; of himself, a monk. On the day of her death Virginia walked out of the house down to the river Ouse and drowned herself; not for nothing was that house called Monk’s House. The letter she left for Leonard was like almost every other suicide note, horribly banal, not a writer’s letter at all, and rich with guilt—“I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. . . . I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.” To Vanessa she wrote, “All I want to say is that Leonard has been so astonishingly good, every day, always; I can’t imagine that anyone could have done more for me than he has. . . . I feel he has so much to do that he will go on, better without me. . . .”

  Saints make guilt—especially when they impose monkish values; there is nothing new in that. And it was the monk as well as her madness she was fleeing when she walked into the Ouse, though it was the saint she praised. “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been,” the note to Leonard ended. A tragic happiness—such a thing is possible: cheerful invalids are a commonplace, and occasionally one hears of happy inmates. A saintly monk, a monkish nurse? All can be taken together, and all are true together. But the drive toward monkishness was in Leonard. What was natural for himself he prescribed for Virginia, and to one end only: to prevent her ongoing nervous crises from reaching their extreme state; to keep her sane. And to keep her sane was, ultimately, to keep her writing. It is reasonable to imagine that without Leonard Woolf there would have been very little of that corpus the name Virginia Woolf calls to mind—there would have been no Mrs. Dalloway, no To the Lighthouse, no The Waves, no Common Reader. And it may be that even the word Bloomsbury—the redolence, the signal—would not have survived, since she was its center. “She would not have been the symbol” of Bloomsbury, T. S. Eliot said, “if she had not been the maintainer of it.” For Bloomsbury as an intellectual “period” to have escaped oblivion, there had to be at least one major literary voice to carry it beyond datedness. That voice was hers.

  The effort to keep her sane was mammoth. Why did Leonard think it was worth it? The question, put here for the second time, remains callous but inevitable. Surely it would have been relieving at last (and perhaps to both of them) to let her slide away into those rantings, delusions, hallucinations; she might or might not have returned on her own. It is even possible that the nursin
g was incidental, and that she recovered each time because she still had the capacity to recover. But often enough Leonard—who knew the early symptoms intimately—was able to prevent her from going under; each pulling-back from that brink of dementia gained her another few months of literary work. Again and again he pulled her back. It required cajolery, cunning, mastery, agility, suspiciousness, patience, spoon-feeding, and an overwhelming sensitiveness to every flicker of her mood. Obviously it drained him; obviously he must have been tempted now and then to let it all go and give up. Almost anyone else would have. Why did he not? Again the answer must be manifold. Because she was his wife; because she was the beloved one to whom he had written during their courtship, “You don’t know what a wave of happiness comes over me when I see you smile”;2 because his conscience obliged him to; because she suffered; because—this before much else—it was in his nature to succor suffering. And also: because of her gift; because of her genius; for the sake of literature; because she was unique. And because she had been a Miss Stephen; because she was Thoby Stephen’s sister; because she was a daughter of Leslie Stephen; because she was, like Leonard’s vision of Cambridge itself, “compounded of . . . the atmosphere of long years of history and great traditions and famous names [and] a profoundly civilized life”; because she was Bloomsbury; because she was England.