The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (132 page)

She never lost her sense of being ill-educated, which she blamed on the feminine stereotype.

Her evenings out remained a painful memory. For example, when she accompanied her half brother George Duckworth and Lady Carnarvon to dinner and theater, she made the terrible mistake, as they talked of art, of asking Lady Carnarvon if she had read Plato. If she had, Lady Carnarvon said, she surely would remember it. Virginia’s question had spoiled the evening and appalled George, for Plato could lead to subjects unsuitable for a young lady to think about, much less discuss in public. He reminded her that “they’re not used to young women saying
anything
.”

But George showed less respect for the proprieties in his brazen sexual advances to his two half sisters, which they found impossible to repulse. He tried to smother their pain and disgust with ostentatious courtesies, presents, and invitations to parties and excursions, but Virginia and Vanessa freely expressed their venomous detestation of him to the puzzlement of friends. Virginia’s first distasteful experience of sex and of child abuse, from her sixth year, affected her profoundly. “I still shiver with shame,” she wrote in the last year of her life, “at the memory of my half brother.” She was also abused by her other half brother, Gerald Duckworth. There is no evidence that Virginia was sexually abused by her father, but he did nothing to protect her. Victorian modest reticence and her mother’s insensitivity prevented her seeking protection. Her recurrent “madness” may have been a reaction to these traumatic childhood experiences.

She had a number of passionate and sometimes troubling love affairs with
women, not only with Vita Sackville-West, whom she admired. Being hotly pursued in 1930 by the aging Ethel Smyth (who sometimes wrote her twice a day) she found less pleasant, for Ethel blew her red nose in her table napkin, and her table manners were repulsive. “It is at once hideous and horrid and melancholy-sad. It is like being caught by a giant crab.” In her letters Virginia casually refers to her own frigidity and wonders why people “make a fuss about marriage & copulation?” She never had children, presumably on her doctor’s advice, but there may have been other reasons. “Never pretend,” she wrote in 1923, “that the things you haven’t got are not worth having.… Never pretend that children, for instance, can be replaced by other things.” Still, her unsavory childhood experiences with George may also have nourished her willingness to rebel against the male-dominated literary world.

To be the writer she wanted to be, she recalled in 1931, she had to conquer a “phantom” hovering over her:

Having killed the Angel in the House, what was the woman writer to do? She need only be herself! “Ah, but what is ‘herself? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know.… I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.”

Despite the world’s inhibitions Virginia Woolf found in herself the resource for her creations. Her birth, her father’s “unexpurgated” library, her female loves, and the circle of leading male intellectuals all helped. But she missed the stimulus of her own generation that she might have had at the university, even as she observed the galaxy of Victorian men of letters whom her father attracted. Seeing Thomas Hardy, John Ruskin, John Morley, and Edmund Gosse over the teacups must have cured any awe of the literary establishment and encouraged her to make new literary connections of her
own. On her father’s death in 1904, with her sister and brothers she moved to 46 Gordon Square in the Bloomsbury district of London. There they attracted a galaxy of their own generation, including Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, and E. M. Forster.

On Thursday evenings, guests gathered at about ten o’clock and stayed till two or three making conversation over whiskey, buns, and cocoa. The Bloomsbury Group—an anti-university of artists, critics, and writers from the universities—were notorious rebels against Victorian inhibitions in art, literature, and sex. By 1941, in wartime London the prim
Times
accused them of producing “arts unintelligible outside a Bloomsbury drawing-room, and completely at variance with those stoic virtues which the whole nation is now called upon to practise.” The Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore (1873–1958) had taught them that “by far the most valuable things … are … the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects … the rational ultimate end of social progress.”

Virginia Woolf became the presiding genius of the group. Among them everything was discussable and seems to have been discussed, including whom Virginia should marry. Dismissing other possibilities, she married Leonard Woolf, whom she described as “a penniless Jew.” At Cambridge he, too, had been a follower of G. E. Moore and a member of the elite Apostles. Woolf had entered the colonial civil service and served in Ceylon for eight years before marrying Virginia in 1912. They had no children, but otherwise this proved an idyllic match, with their shared passion for literature and ideas. Leonard gave up writing novels, but was a prolific editor and author of works of politics, philosophy, and memoirs. Unfailingly attentive to Virginia, he seemed eager to nurture a literary talent superior to his own. Vita Sackville-West noted Virginia’s dislike of “the possessiveness and love of domination in men. In fact she dislikes the quality of masculinity.”

Leonard and Virginia moved out of the Bloomsbury salon and began new collaborations. She had not yet completed her first novel at the time of their marriage. In 1917 at their house in Richmond they founded the Hogarth Press, which consumed much of their energies in following years. Their first publication was
Two Stories
, one by Leonard, one by Virginia. They aimed to publish only experimental work, which included stories by Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot’s
Poems
(1919), poems by Robinson Jeffers and E. A. Robinson, translations of Russian novelists, and Virginia’s own works. They did the typesetting and press work themselves with the occasional help of a friend. At the insistence of Harriet Weaver, the American patron of poets, and through the good offices of T. S. Eliot, the manuscript of Joyce’s
Ulysses
was submitted to them for publication. They were tempted, but found it beyond their capacities. They would have had to employ professional printers, and the ones they consulted objected that printing such a
work would surely lead to their prosecution. Virginia was especially troubled because she and Joyce were pioneering on the same paths of exploring the self. But, as her nephew and perceptive biographer explains, “it was as though the pen, her very own pen, had been seized from her hands so that someone might scrawl the word fuck on the seat of a privy.” Joyce’s “smoking-room coarseness” must have revived the hovering phantom of The Angel in the House.

While there were limits to Virginia’s defiance of convention, her Bloomsbury Group enjoyed tweaking the establishment with pranks in the undergraduate tradition. Most notorious was their Dreadnaught Hoax on February 10, 1910, planned by Virginia’s brother Adrian, to outwit the British Navy and its formidable security with a tour of the most secret vessel of the fleet. A forged telegram from the “Foreign Office” to the commander of the Home Fleet announced a visit of the “emperor of Abyssinia.” The Bloomsbury company, wearing blackface and costumes of imaginary Abyssinian nobility, arrived at Weymouth, were grandly welcomed and given a steam-launch tour of the fleet. Virginia herself, as aide to the emperor, wore actors’ black greasepaint, false mustache and whiskers, but found it hard not to burst out laughing when she ceremoniously shook hands with the admiral of the fleet, who happened to be her cousin. For the “Swahili” they were expected to speak, “Emperor” Adrian concocted phrases from pig Latin and half-remembered lines of Virgil. The London press had a field day, and the House of Commons discussed the matter on the floor. When the pranksters apologized to the first lord of the admiralty, he treated them as schoolboys and told them not to do it again. The press had been especially attracted to the bewhiskered young lady, “very good looking, with classical features,” reputed to be in the party, and Virginia gave them her story. Naval regulations were tightened, especially on telegrams, making it hard to repeat the joke and Virginia recalled, “I am glad to think that I too have been of help to my country.”

Despite her lively sense of humor Virginia’s life was one long bout with “madness,” a vague, emotion-laden label then attached to all sorts of mental illnesses, especially those of women. In Virginia’s own circle, cases of madness were familiar. Thackeray’s wife, the mother of Leslie Stephen’s first wife, had been a victim. Her half-sister Stella had been pursued by a “mad” cousin. The wife of Virginia’s close friend, the painter and critic Roger Fry, was said to be going mad, and had just been committed to an asylum when Virginia joined the tour of Byzantine art in Constantinople that Fry had organized in 1911. Some may have thought Fry himself should be committed for championing the works of Cézanne and others in the first Postimpressionist Exhibition in November 1910.

Virginia Woolf’s first signs of mental illness, at the age of thirteen, came just after her mother died in May 1895. She had a “breakdown” that summer, when she heard “horrible voices” and became terrified of people. All her life she was haunted by fears of recurrence of her madness and of the painful treatment that she suffered. For example, in June 1910, soon after the Dreadnaught Hoax, she fell ill with the “acute nervous tension” that later afflicted her whenever she neared the end of writing a novel. For the “complete rest” that her doctor recommended, she was incarcerated in Miss Thomas’s private nursing home at Burley Park, Twickenham, known as “a polite madhouse for female lunatics.” There two months of penal “rest cure” kept her in bed in a darkened room, eating only “wholesome” foods, while Miss Thomas limited her letters, her reading, and her visitors. Of course she was kept from all London society. After a bad bout in 1913 Leonard feared she would throw herself from the train on their return from the country, and she did attempt suicide with a mortal dose of Veronal, from which she was barely saved by a stomach pump.

Friends wondered that with Virginia’s constant threats of suicide, Leonard too did not go mad during her two years of “intermittent lunacy.” In 1915 one morning at breakfast she suddenly became excited and incoherent, talking to her deceased mother, with spells of violence and screaming, ending in an attack on Leonard himself. She was taken to a nursing home, then to their new home at Hogarth House where they expected to install their printing press. Under the care of four psychiatric nurses, she gradually became lucid and rational, and by the end of 1915 was as much back to normal as she would ever be.

But she never fully recovered, and her “madness” would bring on her death. In late March 1941 Leonard had taken the despondent Virginia to Brighton to consult a doctor in whom she had confidence. Having recently finished
Between the Acts
, she wrote to her publisher saying she did not want the book to be published. On a bright cold morning she wrote two letters, one to Leonard, the other to her sister, Vanessa. She explained that she was once again hearing voices and was sure she would never recover. She would not go on spoiling Leonard’s life for him. “I feel certain,” she wrote Leonard, “I am going mad again. You have given me the greatest possible happiness.… I don’t think two people could have been happier till this horrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer.” She took her walking stick and walked across the meadow to the River Ouse. Once before she had made an unsuccessful effort to drown herself, and this time she had taken the precaution of forcing a large stone into the pocket of her coat. As she walked into the water to her death, her regret, she had already explained to her friend Vita, was that this is “the one experience I shall never describe.”

…

Virginia Woolf’s whole experience had driven her inward. To write about the affairs of the world, the struggles for power and place, or the grand passions, she had little to go on. Her world, a friendly critic put it, was the little world of people like herself, “a small class, a dying class … with inherited privileges, private incomes, sheltered lives, protected sensibilities, sensitive tastes.” Instead of pretending to know people whom she had never known, she accepted her limits, and explored the mystery within. She had the advantage over other pilots on the stream of consciousness of a clear critical style that helped her describe where she was going. And where her predecessors had failed to go.

She had no patience with those who only looked outward, chronicling mere externals. Her literary manifesto, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” replied to Arnold Bennett’s strictures on her for being “obsessed by details of originality and cleverness.” He had insisted that “the foundation of good fiction is character-creating and nothing else.” The Edwardian novelists whom she now targeted—Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy—“laid an enormous stress upon the fabric of things. They have given us a house in the hope that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there.” Such novelists had abandoned their mission.