The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (22 page)

But the relationship was more, and their love was mutual. Stein proposed to Toklas. “Care for me,” she urged. “I care for you in every possible way…. Pet me tenderly and save me from alarm…. When all is said one is wedded to the bed.” Alice Toklas accepted, and so began an almost husband-wife relationship, with Stein the provider and Toklas minding the house and the bills and in general keeping Stein’s life running smoothly.

Stein maintained close relationships with men as well, although they were nonsexual in nature. She was close to Ernest Hemingway, despite the fact that she disliked his overly macho outlook. She once chastised him for his prejudice against lesbians: “You know nothing about any of this really, Hemingway. You’ve met known criminals and sick people and vicious people. The main thing is that the act male homosexuals commit is ugly and repugnant and afterwards they are disgusted with themselves. They drink and take drugs, to palliate this, but they are disgusted with the act and they are always changing partners and cannot be really happy. In women it is the opposite. They do nothing that they are disgusted by and nothing that is repulsive and afterwards they are happy and they can lead happy lives together.” Hemingway, for his part, said of Stein, “I always wanted to fuck her and she knew it.”

As she grew older, Stein made her disgust with heterosexuality more evident:

“If there are men and women, it is rather horrible….” Her life with Toklas was a contented one, and, except for the fact of their lesbianism, almost conventional. Both were faithful and loving to one another, calling each other pet names in private: Toklas was “Pussy,” Stein “Lovely.” But the relationship was

not without passion, as related by Stein in a 1917 piece, “Lifting Belly,” a long rhapsody of lesbian love. In the following poem to Alice, “Caesars” and “cow”

are symbols of sexual pleasure.

Kiss my lips. She did.

Kiss my lips again she did.

Kiss my lips over and over and over again she did….

I’ll let you kiss me sticky….

I say lifting belly and then I say lifting belly and Caesars.

I say lifting belly gently and Caesars gently. I say
lifting belly again and Caesars again…. I say lifting
belly Caesars and cow come out. I say lifting belly
and Caesars and cow come out.

Can you read my print?

Alice answers yes.

In 1946, suffering from cancer, Stein insisted upon surgery. About to be wheeled into the operating room, Stein turned her head to Alice Toklas and said, “What is the answer?” Toklas did not reply. Stein nodded and said, “In that case, what is the question?” These were her last words to her beloved.

Gertrude Stein died that night under anesthesia. She died convinced she was a genius, one of three geniuses she had known, the other two being Pablo Picasso and Alfred North Whitehead. At one time she had suggested another, saying, “Einstein was the creative philosophic mind of the century, and I have been the creative literary mind of the century.”

Alice Toklas lived on without her for another 21 years, heartsick and lonely. At 89 Alice said simply to a friend, “I miss her; I still miss her very much.”

—M.W. and the Eds.

The Abstract Lover

VIRGINIA WOOLF (Jan. 25, 1882–Mar. 28, 1941)

HER FAME:
One of the major writers of the 20th century, Woolf is known, along with Proust and Joyce, as a pioneer of modern fiction. She was also the focal point of a gathering of English avant-garde intellectuals who met as the Bloomsbury group from 1905 to 1920.

HER PERSON:
Born of beauty (her mother, Julia Duckworth, was famous for it) and brains (Sir Leslie Stephen was one of England’s leading literary figures), Virginia inherited both. Tall and thin, she was both elegant and fragile, with deep-set eyes and a classic, ethereal kind of beauty. Writing was her passion

in childhood, and it remained the reigning passion of her life. Virginia had a

quality of otherworldliness which

alienated her from people. The problem

was compounded by periodic bouts of

insanity—when she would hear voices

and hallucinate—which forced her to

retreat from society for months on end.

She had four major breakdowns and

was on the verge of one each time she

completed a novel. At age 25 she began

meeting with her brothers’ Cambridge

friends (the circle later known as

Bloomsbury), where she became famous

for her wit and fascinating flights of

Woolf, age 21

imagination. Though Virginia had

many suitors, she did not marry until she was 30. The following year she completed her first novel and had her most severe breakdown, which lasted almost two years. After the breakdown she remained relatively stable for a while and quite productive, writing at least one book every two years. A well-respected writer from the beginning, she became a bestselling novelist in her 40s. At the height of WWII, having just completed another novel, Virginia felt herself going mad once more. Unable to face another breakdown, she filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse. She was 59.

LOVE LIFE:
Two half brothers, Gerald and George Duckworth, provided Virginia’s unfortunate introduction to sexuality. When she was six, Gerald, then in his 20s, stood her on a ledge and explored her genitals with his hand, an incident she never forgot. During her adolescence George would come into her room at night, fling himself down on her bed, and kiss, fondle, and caress her. Virginia, a young Victorian, endured his habits in mortified silence until she was 22.

Not surprisingly, though Virginia flirted with men, she fell in love with women. At 16 the object of her affection was Madge Vaughan, a beautiful, dark, romantic woman who shared Virginia’s literary tastes. They had an intimate friendship, but Madge soon married. At 20 Virginia began a passionate correspondence with 37-year-old Violet Dickinson, an old friend of the family. Her letters to Violet sound like those to a lover in a physical sense, addressed to “My Violet” or “My Woman,” signed “Yr. Lover.” They are full of endearments, demands, and longings, and such sentiments as “When you wake in the night, I suppose you feel my arms around you.” Oddly enough, however, the actual sexual element was missing, as it was from most of Virginia’s relationships. Her 10-year intimacy with Violet remained a purely emotional affair. Lytton Strachey, called “the arch-bugger of Bloomsbury” by Virginia’s nephew Quentin Bell, proposed to Virginia in 1909. She was well aware of his homosexual preference but accepted him anyway, perhaps because of his wit and reputation as a formidable intellect. However, he retracted the proposal the next day. “I was in terror lest she would kiss me,” he said. Their friendship was salvaged, and it was Strachey who suggested to political activist and writer Leonard Woolf that he court Virginia.

At 30 Virginia married Woolf, who was part of Bloomsbury, only to discover that she was frigid. “I find the climax immensely exaggerated,” she said.

Sexual relations ceased shortly after the honeymoon, though they remained in many ways happily married for 28 years. Virginia loved Leonard more than anyone, unless it was her sister, Vanessa, whose womanliness she also envied.

(Of herself, she once said that she was “not one thing or another, not a man or a woman.”) After her marriage she settled into a life of asexuality and writing. At first Virginia yearned for the motherhood and passion so beautifully embodied by Vanessa, but later she made up her mind on both of those issues:

“I slightly distrust or suspect the maternal passion. I don’t like profound instincts—not in human relationships.” Indeed, her adolescent attitudes toward sex and passion remained with her for the rest of her life: “This vague and dream-like world [of writing], without love, or heart, or passion, or sex, is the world I really care about, and find really interesting.”

Still, there were always affairs. When Virginia was 40, the 30-year-old lesbian Vita Sackville-West fell in love with her, and the feeling was soon mutual.

Vita was a beautiful writer whose aristocratic lineage went back 400 years. Her affair with Virginia lasted five years, and they slept together about a dozen times. This was Virginia’s only physical homosexual affair. It was also her longest-lasting sexual relationship. Remarkably, the sexual aspect of their affair was not cause for shock, guilt, or any particular elation. Nor did Leonard mind, since their marriage was not threatened. As Vita wrote a friend concerning Virginia’s sexuality: “She is not the sort of person one thinks of in that way. There is something incongruous and almost indecent in the idea.” And as Virginia wrote Vita: “It’s a great thing being a eunuch as I am.”

Whatever sexuality Virginia possessed was channeled into her writing.

During her affair and subsequent close friendship with Vita, she produced her best novels—
Mrs. Dalloway
,
To the Lighthouse
,
Orlando
(a fictionalized biography of Vita, which Vita’s husband, Harold Nicolson, called “the longest and most charming love letter in history”), and
The Waves
. After their affair slacked off, composer Ethyl Smith fell violently in love with Virginia, but the pursuit was largely unsuccessful. Virginia wrote two more novels before committing suicide. In her suicide note to Leonard, she said, “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.”

HER THOUGHTS:
“It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly, or man-womanly.”

—J.H.

Born Free

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (Apr. 27, 1759–Sept. 10, 1797)

HER FAME:
This British author was an

advocate of woman’s rights in an era

when women were kept, as she said, “in

silken fetters.” She wrote novels, children’s stories, and, among other

“miscellaneous” works,
A Vindication of

the Rights of Women
, which has been a

continuing inspiration to feminists of

the 19th and 20th centuries.

HER PERSON:
“The first of a new

genus,” she called herself, and she was.

She supported herself as a writer,

belonged to an influential intellectual

circle in London, lived openly with two

men, and, also openly, bore a child out

of wedlock—all at a time when a respectable woman was supposed to marry and hold her tongue.

During her lifetime she assumed responsibility for what she called the Wollstonecraft “standing dish of family cares.” As a child she had stood between her parents to protect her mother from the blows of an alcoholic husband (he once hung a dog in a drunken rage), and Mary had slept outside her parents’ door at night when it was likely that violence might erupt and she would be needed. She also nursed her mother during her last illness and rescued her sister Eliza from an unhappy marriage.

At 15 she had vowed “never … to endure a life of dependence.” To earn a living, she spent two years as a companion to a wealthy woman, ran a day school, and was governess for the daughters of an Irish lord. Meanwhile, wearing her green eyeshade and spectacles, she was writing, and in 1787 her first book was issued by Joseph Johnson, a London publisher, who became her good friend and introduced her to Tom Paine, Joseph Priestley, William Blake, and other famous men. Her
Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) made her reputation; her
Vindication of the Rights of Women
(1792) brought her notoriety. The views she espoused—e.g., social and sexual equality with men, full educational rights for women—shocked many, including Horace Walpole, who dubbed her a “hyena in petticoats.”

A hyena she wasn’t; her manner was charming, her voice soft. Though she considered anger to be her worst fault, self-pity probably was. She was fervent, proud, and prone to melancholy and depression. Twice she attempted suicide,