Adeline (10 page)

But she has done so with her tongue firmly in her cheek and with the most abiding, most encoded sense of skepticism imaginable. Predictably, this is often missed, because all the while, all the time that she has been giving lectures—such serious lectures—“Women and Fiction”—at such serious institutions—Cambridge
Yoni
versity (as Lytton calls it, invoking the Sanskrit dirty word)—and agitating for the cause—in such serious journals of opinion and courts of law—she has always and inescapably been thinking what she has always thought, and what she had said to Leonard years ago: We are apes. I am addressing, I am cajoling, I am rousing a decidedly unshrewd shrewdness of apes.

Look around, she would shout, if only she dared. Look at yourselves, you organ grinder’s monkeys. Listen to yourselves, beating your hairy breasts and hooting your crude arguments, none of which should need to be made. We are animals, you fools, she would rail, spitting all the way up to the gallery, and we are possessed of only three qualities that might in any true sense be said to separate us from the beasts: We have the hubris to call ourselves men; we have the ambition to make ourselves gods; and we have the voluminous capacity for denial required to sustain the former two pretenses.

Who, she wonders, would pay her to say that? And would her fee include or be in addition to the cost of paying someone to clear up all the rotten fruit and vegetables that she would no doubt leave behind, bespattering the venue? She would have to lecture wearing an oilskin and a sou’wester.

And what, after all, of her? The speaker. Is she an ape? Well, naturally, there’s the rub (there must always be one), as well as the extension of the joke, for like all apes, she believes that she is not one. Deep, deep down in her hominid brain, she, too, believes that she is special, rising above. Her politics and culture
will
make some difference, or perhaps just the smallest of ripples in the still-extant primordial ooze.

But—and here is the whole bilious point that so few of even the enlightened few ever seem to quite get—this is why she is so in love with Shakespeare. This is why she lifts him off the shelf almost daily when the work or the world becomes too much, and drinks him in like a cool, purifying draught of cynical moonlight.

He is never serious, and he is full of hate, and though he is rightly said to have invented humankind, he is no friend or lover of his creation. Even his comedies are strong medicine, sugared to help them go down, and the histories and tragedies are unmitigated, bitter as wormwood taken neat.

All his people, with all their overweening self-importance and clamorous life, he creates, he encompasses them so effortlessly, and with a sneer. And, most important for her purposes, all these newfangled bugaboos, these gender troubles in particular; the Bard had dashed them off like so much deadline copy, done and dusted, hands washed. There you are, he’d said in the blithe consigning voice of Pontius Pilate, handing over his folio, I give you the primer, your despicable mankind:
Ecce homo.

About sex and sexuality in particular, there is not a thing in Freud that was not already in Shakespeare, and infinitely better said. (She still has not read Freud, but . . . ) What’s more, all of it, all this trickery of men and women, the Bard had debunked and dispensed with properly, in the context of the human travesty, not ululated it from the rooftops.

This is her way—to make her comedy duck and bite—and she has made it do so.
Orlando
—Vita had been flattered by it, of course—is not a serious book. It is not even a flattering one, and certainly no hagiography of Vita, or some Sapphic fantasia clothed in the hoary verdigris of the peerage. Good God, what a thought. The morons have made her into a poster, and her most careless daubs, her palate cleansers, into shrines. She can only laugh, for
Orlando
is already her most popular book by far, though her least well written. But—fate be praised!—it has made her famous, which, of course, only makes her want to climb to the top of the nearest bell tower and bellow to all the riffraff below: I was teasing, you imbeciles. I was clearing my throat.

Well, let them slurp and moan. She will not shave her head and play Joan of Arc to their sideshow—especially not on behalf of that spitcurled invert Radclyffe Hall, who had, it was true, been unjustly tried and convicted of obscenity in November for daring to write (talentlessly) of women in love. But that did not make her a saint, or Virginia her paladin.

No. Shaw is for canonizing, if that’s your sport. Take his Joan and his tone, and let him orate as he would. The people’s playwright had been given (by his rankled compatriot Joyce, no less) his appropriate title, the Right Honorable Ulster Polonius. Wonderful, and perfect. Let him bask in his plastic laurels. She has no use for them.

Yes, she had done her duty by Hall the previous fall, but
against
the abomination of censorship, not
for
the red herring of inversion. She had signed her worthy name to the sonorous letter of protestation penned by Morgan Forster and published in
The Nation.
She had even trudged to court to testify, if required. But, alas, she had been dismissed uncalled. The book had been banned with a single sweep of the berobed arm and a single indignant toss of the periwigged head. And the presiding buffoon? Ah, well, he had, no doubt, gone to school with Leonard and Lytton.

Does this honestly make no one else laugh?

In
Orlando
she had simply squibbed her own version of what Shakespeare had done. The more direct reference had been, of course, to Ariosto’s and Boiardo’s epic romances
Orlando Furioso
and
Orlando Innamorato
, but
As You Like It
was indubitably there in the fun, in the fungibility of sex and most of all in the mockery. She had shown, with the lightest of touches, much as the Bard had done, that all the obscenity in the world could be slipped past the groundlings with balderdash, and fall unnoticed into what Lytton called the “great chasm of sar” that forever yawned between the wit and the twit. She had parried their censorship.

Could she make it any plainer? Not aloud.

And then, of course, there is this, which is quite the funniest thing of all—and again, patent to all, but ignored, naturally. In England, the only mannishness is in women, and always has been, while all the most weedy, weak and wheedling of the lot are men, who are either fairies outright—the prettiest of them far outpouting and outrougeing the English rose—or are physically unfit in the soldier’s sense for much of anything but billiards and cards.

If Queen Victoria was not a man, who was? And Elizabeth? Was it any wonder such strata of costume and makeup were required? And even then, she hardly outdid her attendant lords. When a smattering of the far-flung native peoples of the Americas were brought before the painted queen’s court to be ogled and probed, it must have been quite difficult for them to tell the sexes of these strange ornamented creatures apart. No doubt they resorted to their noses.

And so it is with Vita, true to the aristocratic line, where it seemed that the titanic mustachioed women so often towered above their milquetoast men and outweighed them by fifty pounds. Surely this must have been the reason for the invention of the top hat, and come to think of it, the Victorian gentleman’s muttonchops—one could not, after all, be quite so outfaced by one’s queen.

Oh, yes, yes, Vita’s retiring spouse Harold Nicolson is all right, the diplomat through and through, amenable, sensible, but with Vita, as meek and incumbent as his own mustache. Looking him over, one felt that one could take him in a scrap if it came to it. She laughs aloud thinking of it now: Vita in her breeches and high-laced boots, astride him on his back, pinning him with her knees and gagging him with a pendulous mouthful of her pearls until he gurgles his assent and agrees to let her ride him round the manor like a Shetland.

That is Vita’s appeal. The size of her, the bones, the breasts, the breath of her, all outsized and smotheringly maternal in a faintly ursine way: She is powerful and blundering and all paws. And that, Virginia supposes, is what she needs from her. Vita will never be the originals, Julia and Nessa, or even come close. She is their overgrown and allowable imitation, fundamentally
faute de mieux.
Sleeping with Vita is as close as Virginia will ever come to sleeping with her mother and sister, or indeed with herself, all of which, she is not afraid to admit to herself, have been abiding fantasies, laid low and channeled elsewise all her life.

Adeline is only her projection, little goat, and that is not the same. They cannot truly make love. Nessa, meanwhile, is all that is left of their mother. She is her blood, beautiful, adored, and inextricably grafted to Virginia’s soul, psychically Siamese. If she, Virginia, could have shot herself into Nessa’s veins, she would have done so long ago. But it is one of the things that is forbidden, and one of the very few such things about which she never jests.

This, of course, is well, well beyond Sapphism and feminism. It is abomination indeed, that lowliest of loves that truly dare not speak its name, especially in a court of law. It has no proponents averring in the dock, as Wilde had done, or marching in the street with the suffragists. It has no one to rouse on its behalf, least of all her, yet it matters awfully. It
is
serious, but in it, as in all the best and most important things, she must be discontented with substitutes.

Still, with Vita, the comparisons are not always so pale, for despite her outward mannishness, there is something saturatedly female about her, too. Not feminine, like Nessa, not in the least, but female, with all its attendant odors and flows which act on the brain as nature intended, by instinct. Vita smells and tastes of the sea and the soil. In Vita’s arms, Virginia inhales the musk and tidal essences of Earth, and she feels incarnate for the first time. She has only ever felt disembodied before.

She had touched on this abstrusely in her lecture “Women and Fiction,” which like so much else had been the tamest version of her thoughts on the subject. She had written and spoken as expected, the advocate for her sex, by turns wry and flinty, but never strident per se. Oh, yes, it would be read and heard as such by the overstuffed boobs of the establishment. They would be provoked, but they would miss the subtext, as, in fact, would the bluestocking disciples she would, and had already, similarly inflamed. They were like an abjection of pilgrims (now there was a collective noun she could endorse) rushing up to the lectern to shake her hand, or barreling into teashops, to behold the blessed face of their paragon and touch the holy hem of her garment. Absurd.

Yet, in one way, they were righter than they knew, for there was that inescapable resurrected quality about this Vita(l)ized Virginia Woolf, the original
noli mi tangere
, which, as of old, had always provoked its opposite. Do not touch, the risen Christ had warned, yet to Thomas he had said: Put your hand inside my wound and believe.

It was the same, what she was doing with Vita, and indeed what all the Sapphists did, most of them unknowingly, reenacting this ritual whose significance they did not wholly understand: the wound where the doubter puts her hand. If that was not sex, what was?

But there is more to it than that, and this she had said in her speech. The lack of identity was prime. She had said it was the anonymity of women who wrote, the authoresses, Elizabethans and before, who had signed their poetry “Anon” because they did not have names. They did not exist. And yet their verses did exist. They themselves disappeared, however, as she did, in the very act of putting words on the page.

A book is a fold of paper and thread, in itself inert, yet in the right hands, it transmits. In the mind of the reader, the hearer, the writing lives. The transference occurs, leaping from one mind to another over time and space and even death. Hence the anonymity of the authorial feat.

And the sex. That is a kind of telepathy as well, achieved in the mind, between minds, and again, by means of primitive instruments. But only with women. A woman. Vita.

With men, even Leonard, dear man, she had never been able to escape her paralytic horror of penetration, the awful sense of being impaled. This was rather the silly bit, though also the ineradicable—she cannot disembarrass the idiom—sticking point. Just at the critical moment, a gruesome image out of
Ivanhoe
(courtesy of Father’s library, no doubt, and the hours she had spent there as a child unsupervised, reading unsuitable material at far too young an age)—the sweat-streaked, torch-lit face of an infidel in his death agony ahoist on the crusader’s spear—would overtake her mind and obfuscate her senses such that she would undergo a kind of breathing rigor mortis that could not fail to repel even the most ardent of suitors.

Try as she might, and she had tried mightily on her honeymoon, she could not help it. It was what she had done with her half brother George, of course, and after a time, even he had desisted, crying in despair, “Damn you, Ginia, you would make me a necrophile.” She had come across this root in her Greek, and noted it in her diary, preferring it thus,
nekro
, the
k
being rightly harsher than the
c.

But with Vita the act of love had changed, both in posture and, of course, anatomy, from one of penetration to one of reaching out, reaching in for the infusion of belief. They have reclined together for hours, Vita cradling, Virginia nestling in the supple comfort of Vita’s bosom. There is no mystery in this. Vita is mother, Virginia child. These roles are also inherent in Sapphism, she feels, and the substance of its appeal.

And so they are incestuous in a sense, after all. Often, as they lie there, Vita reaching ever so tenderly and holding her inside, the pleasure and the sadness overtake, and Virginia weeps. Adeline weeps. And Vita soothes. And then they walk out into the world again separately with no trace of this strange communion on their faces.

In January, she and Leonard, as well as Nessa (who is—can it be?—soon to be fifty years of age), Duncan Grant and Nessa’s middle son Quentin, had spent a week with Vita and Harold in Berlin, where Harold has been posted at the British embassy. It had been an awkward ménage, and in the end, the strain of it had made her ill. Upon returning home, she had been in a state of near-cataleptic infirmity for weeks. But while they had been there—what a saturnalia the city had become!—seeking refuge from the boysblush of buggers who had overtaken all the louchest Weimar bars and nightclubs, delirious with their sex and truffling every groin in sight, she and Nessa had had an abundance of time to themselves. They had spent a good deal of it walking in the city’s botanical gardens, thinking of home and talking of Vita, or, as they’d called it for lack of a more generous term, the ongoing
liaison dangereuse
that Virginia was having with
La Sackville.