Forty-One False Starts (12 page)

When Vanessa married, it was not she but Virginia and Adrian who were expelled from Gordon Square and had to “forage for some flat somewhere.” “Nessa & Clive live, as I think, much like great ladies in a French salon; they have all the wits & the poets; & Nessa sits among them like a Goddess,” Virginia wrote at about the time she and Adrian gave a party at Fitzroy Square whose high point was a dog being sick on the carpet. When Virginia accepted Leonard, it may have been, as Quentin characterizes it, “the wisest decision of her life,” but it did not sweep her up and elevate her to the domestic rank of her sister. Vanessa's household remained the principal residence of the Bloomsbury court, and Virginia's was always secondary, an annex. In view of the fact that the Woolf marriage was a strong and lasting one, and the Bell marriage fell apart after only a few years, it is curious that this was so. But it was so. There was always something a little forlorn and tentative about Virginia and Leonard's household. There were, of course, the bouts of mental illness that Virginia suffered and Leonard nursed her through, which could not but leave in the air of the house their residue of tension and fear. But there was also the fact that Vanessa was a born chatelaine and Virginia was not. Virginia couldn't buy a penwiper without enduring agonies of indecision. As a result, though it is Virginia's literary achievement that has given Bloomsbury its place in cultural history, it is Vanessa's house that has become Bloomsbury's shrine.

Charleston Farmhouse, in Sussex, which Vanessa began to rent in 1916 as a country retreat, and where she and Duncan and (sometimes) Clive lived together for extended periods, was restored in the 1980s and opened to the public. In twentieth-century art, Vanessa and Duncan occupy a minor niche, but their decorations within the farmhouse, painted on door panels, fireplaces, windows, walls, and furniture, convinced some of the keepers of the Bloomsbury flame that the place should be preserved after the death of the ménage's last surviving member—Duncan—in 1978. A trust was formed, money was raised, and the place is now a museum, complete with a gift shop, teas, lectures, a twice-yearly magazine, and a summer-study program. Without the decorations, it is doubtful whether the house would have been preserved. Because of them, the legend of Bloomsbury has a site: readers of the novel of Bloomsbury need no longer imagine; they can now actually enter the rooms where some of the most dramatic scenes took place, can look out the windows the characters looked out of, can tread on the carpets they trod on and stroll in the garden they strolled in. It is as if Mansfield Park itself had been opened up to us as an accompaniment to our reading of the novel.

I visited Charleston last December on an extremely cold, gray day and immediately felt its Chekhovian beauty and sadness. The place has been preserved in its worn and faded and stained actuality. It is an artist's house, a house where an eye has looked into every corner and hovered over every surface, considering what will please it to look at every day—an eye that had been educated by Paris ateliers and villas in the South of France and is not gladdened by English prettiness. But it is also a house of an Englishwoman (an Englishwoman who, on arriving at her rented house in St.-Tropez in 1921, wrote to Maynard Keynes in London to ask him to send a dozen packages of oatmeal, ten seven-pound tins of marmalade, four pounds of tea, and “some potted meat”)—a house where sagging armchairs covered with drooping slipcovers of faded print fabric are tolerated, and where even a certain faint dirtiness is cultivated. In a letter to Roger Fry about a house belonging to the American painters Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson (who had commissioned Vanessa and Duncan to decorate its loggia), Vanessa mocked the “rarefaction” and “spotless order” of the place. “Nan makes muslin covers to receive the flies' excrements (I don't believe Nan and Ethel have any—they never go to the W.), everything has yards and yards of fresh muslin and lace and silk festooned on it and all seems to be washed and ironed in the night,” she wrote, and sighed for “a breath from one's home dirt.” Vanessa's houses were never rarefied or dainty, but neither were they artless congeries of possessions, which was what she coldly judged Ottoline Morrell's Garsington to be: “To me it seems simply a collection of objects she likes put together with enormous energy but not made into anything.”

Making things—visual or literary—was Bloomsbury's dominating passion. It was also, in a paradoxical way, its link to the nineteenth-century past that it was at such pains to repudiate. In their compulsive work habits, the Bloomsbury modernists were behaving exactly as their Victorian parents and grandparents had behaved. There is a moment in Virginia's “Reminiscences” that goes by so fast we may not immediately grasp what it has let drop about the iron hold that the work ethic had on the nineteenth-century mind. Writing of the excesses of grief to which Leslie Stephen was driven by the sudden death of Julia—“There was something in the darkened rooms, the groans, the passionate lamentations that passed the normal limits of sorrow . . . He was like one who, by the failure of some stay, reels staggering blindly about the world, and fills it with his woe”—Virginia pauses to recall Stella's strenuous efforts to distract the grief-stricken widower: “All her diplomacy was needed to keep him occupied in some way, when his morning's work was over.”
When his morning's work was over.
Sir Leslie may have been staggering blindly about the world, but the world would have had to come to an end before he missed a morning at his writing table. Even when he was dying of bowel cancer, he continued to produce startling quantities of prose daily. Leonard, in the fourth volume of his autobiography, spells out what for Virginia went without saying:

We should have felt it to be not merely wrong, but unpleasant not to work every morning for seven days a week and for about eleven months a year. Every morning, therefore, at about 9:30 after breakfast each of us, as if moved by a law of unquestioned nature, went off and “worked” until lunch at 1. It is surprising how much one can produce in a year, whether of buns or books or pots or pictures, if one works hard and professionally for three and a half hours every day for 330 days. That was why, despite her disabilities, Virginia was able to produce so very much.

(In volume V, lest any reader suppose that Leonard and Virginia spent the rest of the day in effete pleasure, he points out that with reviewing, reading for reviewing, and, in Virginia's case, thinking about work in progress or future work—and in his own case, running the Hogarth Press and serving on political committees—they actually worked ten or twelve hours a day.)

At Charleston, from which other spirits have fled and can now be conjured only by letters and diaries, the spirit of industry remains a felt presence. If the place is Chekhovian—as perhaps all country houses situated in precariously unspoiled country, with walled gardens and fruit trees and not enough bathrooms, are—it is not of Chekhovian idleness and theatricality that it speaks but, rather, of the values by which Chekhov's good characters are ruled: patient, habitual work and sensible, calm behavior. (Chekhov was a kind of Bloomsburian himself.) Charleston is dominated by its workplace—its studios and studies and the bedrooms to which guests retired to write. The communal rooms were only two in number—the living room (called the garden room) and the dining room—and were modest in size. They were not the house's hearth. That title belonged to the huge ground-floor studio, where for many years Vanessa and Duncan painted side by side, every day. (In Vanessa's later years she worked in a new studio, in the attic; after her death, Duncan, who stayed on in the house, gradually made the downstairs studio his living quarters.)

The ubiquitous decorations only extend our sense of Charleston as a place of incessant, calm productivity. They give the house its unique appearance, but they do not impose upon it. They belong to the world of high art and design, the world of postimpressionist painting and early-modernist design, and yet, quite mysteriously, they are of a piece with the English farmhouse that contains them and with the English countryside that enters each room through large, old-fashioned windows. During my tour of the house, I was drawn to the windows as if by a tropism. Today, we come to the house to see the decorations and the paintings that Clive and Vanessa and Duncan collected as well as the ones that Vanessa and Duncan produced; but what Clive and Vanessa and Duncan looked at when they entered a room was the walled garden and a willow and the pond and the fields beyond, and as I looked out of the windows they had looked out of, I felt their presence even more strongly than I had when examining their handiwork and their possessions. I visited the house on a day when it was closed to the public, in the company of Christopher Naylor, then the director of the Charleston Trust, who was at least as well acquainted with the novel of Bloomsbury as I was, and who called its characters by their first names, as I have done here—biographical research leads to a kind of insufferable familiarity. After the tour—which rang with “Christophers” and “Janets” as well as with “Clives” and “Duncans” and “Maynards”—my guide tactfully withdrew to allow me to commune alone with the ghosts of the house and to take notes on the decorations. Taking notes proved impossible: after an hour in the unheated house I could no longer move my fingers.

The cold brought my thoughts to the winter of 1918–19, when Vanessa was in the house with Duncan and his boyfriend David Garnett—known as Bunny—and Julian and Quentin and her newborn baby by Duncan, Angelica. Much water had gone over the dam since Clive and Vanessa married and lived like great ladies in Gordon Square. Their marriage had effectively ended in 1914. Clive had reverted to his old ways of philandering; Vanessa had fallen in love with Roger Fry and had had an affair with him, which ended when she fell in love with Duncan. The war had brought Vanessa and Duncan and Bunny to Charleston. Duncan and Bunny, who were conscientious objectors, maintained their status by doing farm-work. Their first employment was restoring an old orchard, but when the military board required more seriously unpleasant farmwork Vanessa rented Charleston, so that Duncan and Bunny could work on the adjoining farm. Although Duncan was passionately in love with Bunny, he sometimes graciously consented to sleep with Vanessa when Bunny was away. Frances Spalding, in her biography of Vanessa, published in 1983, quoted a rather awful entry in Duncan's diary of 1918, written during a five-day absence of Bunny's:

I copulated on Saturday with her with great satisfaction to myself physically. It is a convenient way, the females, of letting off one's spunk and comfortable. Also the pleasure it gives is reassuring. You don't get this dumb misunderstanding body of a person who isn't a bugger. That's one for you Bunny!

Thus Angelica. She was born on Christmas Day of 1918, and in her first weeks she almost joined Julia and Stella and Thoby as a casualty of disastrously incompetent doctoring; the intervention of a new doctor saved her life. (Five years later, Virginia, writing in her diary of another near miss—Angelica had been knocked down by a car in London—described the terrible scene in a hospital ward with Vanessa and Duncan when it appeared certain that “death & tragedy had once more put down his paw, after letting us run a few paces.” Angelica turned out to be unharmed: “It was only a joke this time.”)

After his appearance at Angelica's cradleside, “the great cat” retreated, and Vanessa was allowed almost twenty more years of the happiness she had willed into being when she left Hyde Park Gate and painted the walls of 46 Gordon Square with distemper. “How much I admire this handling of life as if it were a thing one could throw about; this handling of circumstances,” her sister wrote about her, and “How masterfully she controls her dozen lives; never in a muddle, or desperate or worried; never spending a pound or a thought needlessly; yet with it all free, careless, airy, indifferent.”

The man Vanessa had chosen to be her life's partner is still a veiled character; our understanding of Duncan must await Frances Spalding's biography, now in preparation. He seems to have been extremely good-looking and charming and disarming, as well as eccentrically vague, and perhaps somewhat selfish. He was six years younger than Vanessa, but she deferred to him as an artist; she considered herself several steps behind him. (This judgment was reflected in their relative positions in the British art world at the time; today, there seems less of a gap between their achievements.) He was one of the Bloomsbury aristocrats (he was Lytton's cousin), as Bunny Garnett, for example, was not. Bunny went straight—or reverted to being straight—soon after Angelica's birth. Duncan transferred his affections to another man, and to others after him, but he permanently remained Vanessa's companion, and she gamely accepted the terms of his companionship. (From her letters to Duncan we may gather that these terms were rather hard ones, and that she
was
sometimes in a muddle and desperate and worried about how to maintain her equilibrium in the face of them.) Her relationship with Clive, meanwhile, was friendly and intimate, a sort of unsinister version of the relationship between the former lovers of
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
.

Vanessa's remarkable domestic arrangement seems almost an inevitability: What could be a better riposte to Victorian hypocrisy and dreariness than a husband who brought his mistresses around for amused inspection and a lover who was gay? By any standard, the Bell-Grant household was a strange one, and in the 1920s there were still plenty of people who could find it excitingly scandalous. One of them was Madge Vaughan, an old family friend, ten years older than Vanessa, who was the daughter of John Addington Symonds. (Symonds, as it happens, was one of the biggest closet queens of the Victorian age, a fact that came out only years after his and Madge's deaths.) In March 1920, Vanessa received a letter from Madge that made her, she said, “half amused and half furious.” The letter was written from Charleston, where Madge, in Vanessa's absence, was staying briefly while deciding whether or not to rent the place for a long family holiday. “I love you & I am
faithful
to old friends,” Madge wrote, and she went on: