Forty-One False Starts (15 page)

I said that I had assumed Julian's extreme leftness because of his going to Spain in 1937.

“That is a common misconception about Julian,” Quentin said, and he went on, “Julian liked wars. He was a very austere person.” As Quentin talked about his brother, I felt that he was answering, in part, a question that had “stabbed my heart” when I was reading Vanessa's extraordinarily intimate letters. Some of them, as she herself was aware, were almost love letters, and I had wondered what Quentin's feelings had been as the less obsessively loved son who had survived the favorite's death. But I did not pursue the point. Quentin has negotiated the feat of presiding over the Bloomsbury biographical industry while keeping himself out of the Bloomsbury narrative. He has offered only the barest indication of how he felt when he was growing up in his mother's remarkable household. He is mentioned in the family letters and memoirs and diary entries, of course, but the references are rather sparse and uninformative. (In a few of the Bloomsbury photographs in which he appears we glimpse some of the charm and merriness of the author of
Virginia Woolf
.) He is almost a kind of generic younger son; Julian is always more visible and more fussed over. Julian's large shadow may have given Quentin's character the protection it needed to flourish outside the family orbit. For whatever reason, Quentin has succeeded in living his own life and keeping his own counsel. Now, in his mid-eighties, he evidently feels it safe (as his uncle Leonard felt it safe in
his
eighties) to break his silence and donate his person to the Bloomsbury novel. He has written a memoir, to be published in England in the fall.

Among the books I had bought in the Charleston gift shop (I noticed that neither DeSalvo's nor Poole's book was on sale there) was a thin pamphlet called
Editing Virginia Woolf's Diary
in which Olivier writes of her experiences as the editor of the diaries that Virginia kept between 1915 and 1941. Their publication, in five volumes, has earned her the highest praise for the excellence of their annotations. In the pamphlet, Olivier writes with a voice as distinct as Quentin's, and with a tart note of her own about the invasions of scholars and journalists that followed the publication of
Virginia Woolf
:

The house became a sort of honey-pot with all these Woolf addicts buzzing around. I had to provide some of the honey in the form of food and drink. Earnest seekers after the truth armed with tape recorders came from Tokyo, Belgrade, or Barcelona; others we came to refer to as “beard-touchers”—those for whom it was obligatory to be able to state “I consulted with Professor Bell” when submitting their doctoral dissertations on
Mythic Patterns in “Flush”
or whatever it might be.

She allows herself a bitter comment: “We have sometimes found it hurtful to read articles or reviews by those we have entertained and informed and given up our time to, to the effect that we operated a sort of Bloomsbury closed shop—a protection racket maintained for the purposes of self-aggrandisement and financial gain.” (As Olivier points out in the acknowledgments to volume IV of the diaries, their full publication was possible only because Quentin's share of the royalties issuing from the copyright of Virginia's writings, which he and Angelica inherited from Leonard, were used to pay the costs.) Olivier's tartest comments, however, are reserved for the revisionist works “purporting to demonstrate that both Leonard and Quentin had completely misrepresented [Virginia], and by concealing or cooking the evidence to which only they had access, had been able to present
their
preferred image—and one in which Leonard himself figured as hero.” She goes on, “Perhaps the most grotesque manifestations of this line of approach have been those which discern that it was the fundamental antagonism, sometimes fuelled by Virginia's alleged anti-semitism, between her and Leonard which drove her, not only to periods of despair, but to suicide; indeed, it has been suggested that he practically pushed her into the river.”

I have to confess that I did not buy
Editing Virginia Woolf's Diary
because I expected it to be interesting. The title is about as enticing as a piece of dry brown bread. What enticed me was the pamphlet's cover, which reproduces one of the minor but, in their way, momentous visual pleasures of the Charleston house. This pleasure—lying on a table beside an armchair in the living room—is a book on whose front cover someone (Duncan, it turns out) has pasted a few geometric shapes of hand-colored paper to form a most handsome and authoritative abstraction of olive green, umber, black, ocher, and blue. The book is a volume of plays of J. M. Synge, inscribed to Duncan from Clive in 1913. Why Duncan decorated it thus, no one knows—perhaps a child had put a glass of milk on it and left a ring, perhaps Duncan just felt like making a collage that day. Whatever its impetus, Duncan's little project comes down to us (Olivier told me she had pulled the book back from the brink of consignment to Sotheby's) as an emblem of the spirit of unceasing, unself-conscious—you could almost say artless—art making by which Charleston was inhabited.

Sitting beside me at the long, scrubbed table, Quentin returned to Angelica's book and to a photograph of Vanessa she included in it, which distressed him perhaps more than anything else in it. “Now, why did she put that picture in?” he said. “It's the only photograph of Vanessa I've ever seen that makes her look ugly. Do you agree?”

I said I did. The picture shows a grim old woman (it is dated 1951, when Vanessa was seventy-two) with thinning gray hair and round black-rimmed glasses; her mouth is turned down at the corners, and she is returning the camera's pitiless gaze with a kind of wounded directness. The photograph bears no resemblance to others of Vanessa that appear in Angelica's book, or to photographs of her that appear in any other Bloomsbury books. Nothing remains in it of the determined schoolgirl of Hyde Park Gate or the beautiful girl in white whom Leonard saw at Cambridge or the serene woman looking up from an easel or presiding over a garden tea table or the Madonna posing with her children. It is a picture out of a different world—a world stripped of beauty and pleasure and culture, the world of Forster's “panic and emptiness,” the world after the great cat has pounced. “I really pity people who are not artists most of all, for they have no refuge from the world,” Vanessa wrote in 1939 to a friend that Julian had made in China. “I often wonder how life would be tolerable if one could not get detached from it, as even artists without much talent can, as long as they are sincere.” In Angelica's ugly picture, Vanessa is caught in a moment of engagement with the intolerable.

In “A Sketch of the Past” Virginia describes “a certain manner” that she and Vanessa were indelibly taught to assume when people came to tea at Hyde Park Gate: “We both learnt the rules of the game of Victorian society so thoroughly that we have never forgotten them,” she wrote in 1940.

We still play the game. It is useful. It has also its beauty, for it is founded upon restraint, sympathy, unselfishness—all civilized qualities. It is helpful in making something seemly out of raw odds and ends . . . But the Victorian manner is perhaps—I'm not sure—a disadvantage in writing. When I read my old
Literary Supplement
articles, I lay the blame for their suavity, their politeness, their sidelong approach, to my tea-table training. I see myself, not reviewing a book, but handing plates of buns to shy young men and asking them: do they take cream and sugar? On the other hand, the surface manner allows one, as I have found, to slip in things that would be inaudible if one marched straight up and spoke out loud.

Angelica has marched straight up and spoken out loud. She has cut her family down to size. She has shown up the civilized, oblique Bloomsbury manner for the hollow thing she believes it to be. She is a kind of counter-Cassandra—she looks back and sees nothing but darkness. Quentin's quarrel with Angelica over her book is more than a sibling's tiff about whose story is right. It is a disagreement about how stories of lives should be told. “To some extent the difference between us is the difference between one who plods and one who flies,” Quentin writes with characteristic sidelongness in his review of
Deceived with Kindness
, as he crushingly subjects his sister's flights of accusing generalization to his own tolerant specificity. The struggle between the obedient, legitimate son of Bloomsbury and its disobliging, illegitimate daughter is an uneven one, and Quentin will prevail. The achievement of his biography, his wise and liberal management of the family papers, and the existence of Charleston (in whose restoration Angelica took an active hand, such is the messiness of life: in a novel, she would never have looked at the place again) ensure the preservation of the Bloomsbury legend in its seductive fauve colors. But Angelica's cry, her hurt child's protest, her disappointed woman's bitterness will leave their trace, like a stain that won't come out of a treasured Persian carpet and eventually becomes part of its beauty.

THE WOMAN WHO HATED WOMEN

1986

The world of Edith Wharton's novels—sometimes erroneously thought to be the actual world of late-nineteenth-century New York—is a dark, nightmarish place peopled by weak, desperate men and destructive, pathetic, narcissistic women. To read the four novels in this volume
*
is to become impressed anew with Wharton's powers as a satirist—you could almost say a black humorist—and to be struck, perhaps for the first time, by the cool modernism of her writing. She is not the wan, old-fashioned realist we have taken her to be; she works not in the delicate traceries of Mrs. Gaskell, but in the black, bold strokes of Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, Don DeLillo. Her books are pervaded by a deep pessimism and an equally profound misogyny.

Wharton's stately autobiography,
A Backward Glance
, written in 1934 when she was seventy-two, is a sort of tour de force of self-control: she tells us exactly what she wants to tell us in a tone that never falters, and she cuts exactly the figure she has chosen to cut. The little betrayals (of complacency, pomposity, self-congratulation) that leak out of so many autobiographies simply do not leak out of Wharton's. It is a remarkable performance, and indeed, the august persona that Wharton created for herself is such a powerful one that her biographer R.W.B. Lewis simply transferred it to the pages of his own stately book; it is to Cynthia Griffin Wolff's restlessly original psychoanalytic literary study,
A Feast of Words
, that we must go to get beneath the onyx surface formed by
A Backward Glance
and the Lewis biography, and receive a sense of the troubled human being from whom the literary artist derives.

But if
A Backward Glance
yields no personal secrets, it does not disappoint the snooper after literary secrets. In at least two places, Wharton inadvertently lets the figure in the carpet of her fiction come briefly into view. The first of these rare glimmerings is afforded by a strange story that Wharton says she heard in her youth in Newport, Rhode Island, from “a thin young man with intelligent eyes” named Cecil Spring-Rice, who appeared at a yachting party, told this and another story, and was never seen by her again. Like an analytic patient prefacing an important self-revelation with the obligatory disclaimer “this isn't very interesting,” Wharton writes, “I record our single encounter only because his delightful talk so illuminated an otherwise dull afternoon that I have never forgotten the meeting.” She then tells this story:

A young physician who was also a student of chemistry, and a dabbler in strange experiments, employed a little orphan boy as assistant. One day he ordered the boy to watch over, and stir without stopping, a certain chemical mixture which was to serve for a very delicate experiment. At the appointed time the chemist came back, and found the mixture successfully blent—but beside it lay the little boy, dead of the poisonous fumes.

The young man, who was very fond of his assistant, was horrified at his death, and in despair at having involuntarily caused it. He could not understand why the fumes should have proved fatal, and wishing to find out, in the interest of science, he performed an autopsy, and discovered that the boy's heart had been transformed into a mysterious jewel, the like of which he had never seen before. The young man had a mistress whom he adored, and full of grief, yet excited by this strange discovery, he brought her the tragic jewel, which was very beautiful, and told her how it had been produced. The lady examined it, and agreed that it was beautiful. “But,” she added carelessly, “you must have noticed that I wear no ornaments but earrings. If you want me to wear this jewel, you must get me another one just like it.”

With this story we leave the bland everyday world of the autobiography and plunge into the mysterious, symbolic universe of Edith Wharton's fiction, where “strange experiments” (that is, deviations from the social norm) inexorably lead to tragedy, and where the callousness and heartlessness by which this universe is ruled is the callousness and heartlessness of women. There are no bad men in Wharton's fiction. There are weak men and there are foolish men and there are vulgar New Rich men, but no man ever deliberately causes harm to another person; that role is exclusively reserved for women. From the “society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers” that Wharton grimly satirizes in
The House of Mirth
(1905) and holds accountable for the death at twenty-eight of its beautiful, luxury-loving, moneyless heroine, Lily Bart (“A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys,” Wharton writes in
A Backward Glance
), she selects a woman, Bertha Dorset, to be the instrument of Lily's ruin.

Bertha is the personification of female treachery and malevolence and, incidentally, sexual voraciousness; she has no private character. When we meet her in the early pages of the novel, making a nuisance of herself on a train, she is rendered with the pouncing strokes of a Pascin drawing: “She was smaller and thinner than Lily Bart, with a restless pliability of pose, as if she could have been crumpled up and run through a ring, like the sinuous draperies she affected. Her small pale face seemed the mere setting of a pair of dark exaggerated eyes, of which the visionary gaze contrasted curiously with her self-assertive tone and gestures; so that, as one of her friends observed, she was like a disembodied spirit who took up a great deal of room.”