Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (66 page)

As Lee reminds us, although Bloomsbury talked daring sex, their performance between the sheets was often less impressive. There is, Lee detects, ‘something inconclusive’ in Woolf’s account: George was still living and the Duckworth Press published her early books. Her relationship with her bumbling half-brother in later life was mildly contemptuous but generally good-natured and she wrote affectionately about him when he died some years before her. If they occurred, his abuses may have been ‘more emotional than penetrative’, Lee concludes and goes on to declare, with a bluntness of phrase designed to blow away the fogs of feminist mystification which swirl around the Woolf abuse/rape/incest hypotheses, ‘There is no way of knowing whether the teenage Virginia Stephen was fucked or forced to have oral sex or buggered.’

Virginia Woolf drowned herself in 1941 (no doubt about that), fearing the onset of another of her horrific attacks of madness and possibly alarmed – as was most of Britain at the time – by the prospect of German invasion. As the wife of a leftist intellectual Jew, she had every right to feel apprehensive. Anxiety is something discernible in her last novel, published at this period,
Between the Acts
(1941). In the period leading up to her last, fatal act, she was also jotting down notes for an autobiography, with an essay provisionally entitled ‘A Sketch of the Past’ (1939). She was, at the time, much taken with Freud (the Hogarth Press, which she and her husband Leonard ran, was Freud’s authorised English publisher – something else Heinrich Himmler would not have liked) and what she called ‘autoanalysis’. Childhood sexual experience was, according to Freudian doctrine, formative.

In her autoanalytic explorations she evidently trawled up a traumatic ‘recovered memory’. It is not found anywhere else in her voluminous private journals and correspondence. Why, she mused, did she so fear mirrors and reflections of herself in them?

I thus detect another element in the shame which I had in being caught looking at myself in the glass in the hall. I must have been ashamed or afraid of my own body. Another memory, also of the hall, may help to explain this. There was a slab outside the dining room door for standing dishes upon. Once when I was very small Gerald Duckworth lifted me onto this, and as I sat there he began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But it did not stop. His hand explored my private parts too. I remember resenting, disliking it – what is the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling? It must have been strong, since I still recall it.

She returned to the event in a letter to her friend, Ethel Smyth, a few weeks before her suicide. How could one write an honest autobiography, she asked, unless one came clean about such essentially dirty things?

In the next two decades, along with the whole company of ‘Bloomsberries’, Woolf’s star sank – mainly under the sneering assaults of the new critical puritans (the ‘Leavisites’) at Cambridge. The first authoritative biography, by Virginia’s nephew Quentin Bell, in 1972, glossed over the ‘abuse’ episodes as part of the rough and tumble of an otherwise extraordinary family life – if anything Bell seemed sympathetic to the Duckworth lads. The emergence in the mid-1960s of the women’s and gay liberation movements, and their impact on academic scholarship, elevated Woolf to canonical status. Doctoral dissertations, monographs, learned articles, popular spin-off pieces, and whole journals dedicated themselves to her life, her works and the importance of a ‘room of one’s own’. The ‘abuse’ moments were seen as centrally significant to understanding Virginia Woolf and she herself was now a writer of near-Shakespearian importance to English literature.

Tendentious, but typical, was Louise A. DeSalvo’s
Virginia Woolf: the Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work
(1989), which opened with the uncompromising declaration: ‘Virginia Woolf was a sexually abused child; she was an incest survivor.’ Lee, coming rather later into the biographical game in the mid-1990s, handles the abuse material more judiciously. She is disinclined to see the Duckworths as conspiratorial rapists. She opposes the idea that molestation ‘can be made to explain all of Virginia Woolf’s mental history’. There were other, quite as damaging, psychic injuries. In her ‘Sketch’, for example, Woolf herself lays heavier stress on the death of her mother, in 1890, when she was thirteen: ‘This brought on, naturally, my first “breakdown” … I was terrified of people … For two years I never wrote. The desire left me, which I have had all my life, with that two years break.’ None the less Lee allows that there are, arguably, traces detectable in the
fiction. Why, she asks, is there just one kiss described in all of Woolf’s work (in
Mrs Dalloway
)?

Other critics have been more single-minded on the matter. That Virginia was ‘incested’ is ubiquitous orthodoxy and, like Dickens’s blacking factory trauma, the royal road to understanding her tormented genius. A main element in this new orthodoxy is the contention that Woolf’s work and life is founded on a principled recoil from the ‘male-made mess’ of the world (the First World War she saw, in some moments, as a ‘preposterous masculine fiction’). It is taken for granted that she was sexually frigid with men, but joyously liberated in her ‘sapphic’ relationship, in her mature years, with Vita Sackville-West (who, none the less, like Leonard, was ‘scared to death of arousing physical feelings in her because of the madness’). A complicating factor is the well-recorded fact that at the time of her marriage to Leonard Woolf, in August 1912, Virginia genuinely wanted children (‘brats’, as she fondly called them). Leonard, however, feared the ‘excitement’ of pregnancy would trigger catastrophic mental breakdown. It may be, too, that impregnation would not have been easy. Clive Bell confided to Mary Hutchinson (his mistress) that ‘Woolf fucks her once a week but has not yet succeeded in breaking her maidenhead.’ As late as 1933, Virginia herself was jesting on the subject, suggesting that she and a friend might have ‘the operation’ (surgical rupturing of the hymen) done side by side in a Bond Street clinic.

By the early 1920s, the marriage, both partners confided to different friends, was ‘chaste’. Neither party was unfaithful to the other. It was merely that sex had been turned off, like some irritatingly dripping tap. Leonard seems to have been the dominant partner in this suspension of full marital intimacy, supported by medical advice. After menopause, Virginia told a friend she regretted not having forced Leonard to take the risk, ‘in spite of doctors’. The unborn children made her ‘wretched in the early hours’. Whether children actually crying, night after night, would have been fulfilling who can say? Put another way, could Mrs Ramsay, with those ‘brats’ around her ankles and at her breast, have written
To the Lighthouse
?

Dr. Fu-Manchu – the yellow peril incarnate in one man.

Sax Rohmer was born ‘Arthur Ward’ in Birmingham, the only child of Irish immigrants. His father was a clerk; his mother is recorded as alcoholic. The family moved to London when Arthur was an infant and his school education was intermittent, although he picked up an impressive literacy from his father. It is likely, given his later fascination with xenophobia, that he suffered prejudice (‘bog-trotter!’) in his early years. The lifelong flight from his birth-name suggests this as does his posturing for publicity photographs, in later life, in silk kimono and pigtail, looking sinister, wholly un-Irish and more ridiculous than even Peter Sellers could ever do justice to.

He later took on the surname ‘Sarsfield’ because, allegedly, his mother misinformed him that they were descended from the seventeenth-century General of that name. ‘Sax’ was good old-fashioned ‘Sax[on]’ and ‘Rohmer’, sometimes with an umlaut, was Nordic enough to pass a
Sturmabteilung
name check.

Little is known about Rohmer’s life and he obfuscated what details are known outrageously. He briefly followed his father into clerking before drifting into Grub Street. He was fascinated by ancient Egypt and his first recorded fiction is the short story ‘The Mysterious Mummy’, for
Pearson’s Magazine
, in 1903 (the plot involves a thief hiding in a sarcophagus to steal a priceless vase).

Rohmer loved the Edwardian music hall. He wrote sketches and songs and his first published book was a ghosted autobiography of the famous comedian ‘Little Tich’ (Harry Relph). In 1909 he married Rose Elizabeth Knox, the daughter of another, less famous, comedian, who was herself a performer in a juggling act. Rose was also a clairvoyant and supposedly the young Sax asked her how he could make his fortune. Her Ouija board responded: C-H-I-N-A-M-A-N. Rohmer would later create the series hero, Morris Klaw, an ‘occult detective’ who solves crimes by dreams and ESP. And the Chinaman clue proved prescient because Rohmer’s breakthrough bestseller was
The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu
, published by Methuen in 1913. It draws, rather too obviously, on Guy Boothby’s magnificent arch-criminal in
Dr Nikola
(1896) and Rohmer lifts a number of actual scenes from the other novelist. He had clearly also taken on board M. P. Shiel’s bestseller
The Yellow Danger
(1898). A perplexed Colin Watson notes, ‘The plots of the Fu-Manchu novels, such as they are, would be quite meaningless in paraphrase. They are a jumble of incredible encounters, pursuits, traps and escapes. Who is trying to accomplish what, and why – this is never explained. All that seems certain is that a titanic struggle is being waged by a man called Nayland Smith to thwart the designs of Fu-Manchu.’ True enough, but they were read; and as film adaptations, watched by millions for the best part of half a century.

The narrative of the first in the series (of fifteen eventually) opens with Sir Denis Nayland Smith, a British government official in Burma, making a surprise call on his old London friend Dr Petrie (Smith’s Dr Watson, as he is to be). Smith is enjoying a spot of leave during which he intends to save the ‘White Race’ from the fiendish plots of Dr Fu-Manchu. ‘He is no ordinary criminal,’ Smith informs an appalled Petrie: ‘He is the greatest genius which the powers of evil have put on earth for centuries. He has the backing of a political group whose wealth is enormous and his mission in Europe is
to pave the way!
Do you follow me? He is the advance-agent of a movement so epoch-making that not one Britisher, and not one American, in fifty thousand has ever dreamed of it.’ Except, that is, Sax Rohmer and his legions of readers.

An opium addict, Fu-Manchu is physically deformed. He is possessed of ‘viridescent eyes’ with which he hypnotises his victims: he is a ‘profound chemist’, a white slaver, and ‘the genius of the yellow peril’. Like Guy Boothby’s arch-fiend Dr Nikola (who has his cat Apollyon), Fu-Manchu has a sinister pet – a trained marmoset. It emerges that his immediate plan is to kill all high-ranking Britons who know anything whatsoever about the East. Nayland Smith is, naturally, top of the list. The yellow devil uses extravagantly ingenious methods to accomplish his goal: ‘the Zayat Kiss’ (poisonous centipedes), the ‘Call of Siva’ (thuggee assassins), the ‘Green Mist’ (gas), and, in the novel’s climax, ‘Fungi Cellars’, in which poisonous mushrooms grow at lethal speed. After a series of encounters, in which Smith finally foils his adversary, the yellow villain escapes from a burning house, taking care, however, to leave a letter promising his return.

In addition to selling millions, Rohmer’s novel may have been influential in bringing in the international control of narcotics in 1914 – the measure which W. S. Burroughs thought more catastrophic than the First World War – or the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which kept the yellow peril, as he called it, from swamping the US until 1943. (Another novelist, Pearl S. Buck, was helpful in reversing the obnoxious measure.)

In the First World War, Rohmer fought briefly in the Artists’ Rifles before being invalided out. In the postwar period, Fu-Manchu and other lurid tales enriched him, while he as resolutely impoverished himself by his addictive gambling. He built himself a country house, travelled across the world – with disastrous stops at Monte Carlo’s green baize tables. He sold his rights to the Fu Manchu franchise for a reputed $4 million shortly before his death, but left only a measly thousand pounds.

Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle.
Ferber, on being single

One of the twentieth century’s most popular chroniclers of the American Dream, Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, into a first-generation Jewish family. Her father was a Hungarian-born shop-owner whose business was to prove chronically unsuccessful in the New World. Her mother was from a well-off Chicago family. The Ferbers moved to several Midwestern towns during Edna’s childhood, experiencing anti-Semitism, which partly motivated their moves. She stayed for longish periods with her mother’s family in Chicago and graduated from high school in Appleton, Wisconsin. Although she was clearly gifted, family circumstances made college impossible. Her father’s sight failed and Edna took over the Ferber store, running it well enough to free the family from debt. The intrepid, ‘capable’ woman succeeding against the odds was to be the mainstay plot in her subsequent fiction.