The legend of Bloomsbury—the tale of how Virginia and Vanessa Stephen emerged from a grim, patriarchal Victorian background to become the pivotal figures in a luminous group of advanced and free-spirited writers and artists—takes its plot from the myth of modernism. Legend and myth alike trace a movement from darkness to light, turgid ugliness to plain beauty, tired realism to vital abstraction, social backwardness to social progress. Virginia Woolf chronicled her own and her sister’s coming of age in the early years of this century much as Nikolaus Pevsner celebrated the liberating simplifications of modern design in his once influential but now perhaps somewhat outdated classic “Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From William Morris to Walter Gropius” (1936). As Pevsner shuddered over the “coarseness and vulgar overcrowding” of a carpet shown in the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London (“We are forced to step over bulging scrolls and into large, unpleasantly realistic flowers. . . . And this barbarism was by no means limited to England. The other nations exhibiting were equally rich in atrocities”), so Virginia, in her memoir “Old Bloomsbury” (1922), recoiled from the suffocating closeness of her childhood home, at 22 Hyde Park Gate, in Kensington—a tall, narrow, begloomed house of small irregular rooms crammed with heavy Victorian furniture, where “eleven people aged between eight and sixty lived, and were waited upon by seven servants, while various old women and lame men did odd jobs with rakes and pails by day.” And, as Pevsner turned with relief to the spare, sachlich designs of the twentieth-century pioneers, so Virginia exulted in the airy and spacious house on Gordon Square, in Bloomsbury, where she and Vanessa and their brothers, Thoby and Adrian, went to live by themselves in 1904, after the death of their father. (Vanessa was twenty-five, Thoby was twenty-four, Virginia was twenty-two, and Adrian was twenty-one.) “We decorated our walls with washes of plain distemper,” Virginia wrote, and:
Nine years earlier, when Virginia was thirteen, her mother, Julia Stephen, had died, suddenly and unexpectedly, of rheumatic fever, at the age of forty-nine, and two years after that Stella Duckworth, one of Julia’s three children from a previous marriage, who had become the angel of the house in Julia’s place, died of peritonitis, at the age of twenty-eight. These deaths only darkened the darkness, coarsened the atrocious figures in the carpet. Leslie Stephen, the eminent Victorian writer and editor, tyrannized the household with his Victorian widower’s hysterical helplessness, and George Duckworth, Stella’s brainless brother, couldn’t keep his hands off Vanessa and Virginia while affecting to comfort them. Virginia’s strength was unequal to the pressure of “all these emotions and complications.” A few weeks after Leslie’s death, she fell seriously ill. “I had lain in bed at the Dickinsons’ house at Welwyn”—Violet Dickinson was then her best friend—“thinking that the birds were singing Greek choruses and that King Edward was using the foulest possible language among Ozzie Dickinson’s azaleas,” Virginia wrote of this descent into madness, the second in the series (the first followed her mother’s death) by which her life was plagued and eventually cut short. When she recovered—the anti-psychotics of the time were bed rest, overfeeding, and boredom—her old home was gone and the new one was in place. It was on Vanessa’s sturdier shoulders that the weight of life at Hyde Park Gate had fallen after Stella’s death (her siblings called her the Saint when they wanted to enrage her), and it was she who engineered the move to Gordon Square, selecting the neighborhood (then an unfashionable one), finding the new house, renting the old one, and distributing, selling, and burning its accretions.
There is a photograph of Stella, Virginia, and Vanessa, taken around 1896, the year after Julia’s death, in which a classically profiled Stella looks demurely downward; an ethereal Virginia, in half profile, gazes pensively, perhaps a little strangely, into the middle distance; and a solid Vanessa stares straight into the camera, her features set in an expression of almost harsh resolve. Without Vanessa’s determination—and by the time of Leslie Stephen’s death she was already making good on her ambition to be an artist, having studied drawing and painting since her early teens—it is doubtful whether the flight of the orphans to Gordon Square would have taken place. Nor, more to the point, would there have been the Thursday-evening parties that were, Virginia playfully wrote, “as far as I am concerned the germ from which sprang all that has since come to be called—in newspapers, in novels, in Germany, in France—even, I daresay, in Turkey and Timbuktu—by the name of Bloomsbury.” A period of happiness had begun that, as Virginia described it, was like the giddy early months of freshman life at college. She and Vanessa had not, of course, gone to college—even girls from literary families like the Stephens did not go to college then—but Thoby had gone to Cambridge, and came home on vacations to tell his wide-eyed sisters of his remarkable friends: of the frail, ultra-cultivated Lytton Strachey, who once, as Virginia wrote, “burst into Thoby’s rooms, cried out, ‘Do you hear the music of the spheres?’ and fell in a faint”; of an “astonishing fellow called Bell. He’s a sort of mixture between Shelley and a sporting country squire”; of a “very silent and thin and odd” man named Saxon Sydney-Turner, who was “an absolute prodigy of learning” and “had the whole of Greek literature by heart.” These and other Cambridge classmates became the Thursday-evening harbingers of Bloomsbury and the sisters’ initiators into the pleasures of late-night conversation on abstract subjects (beauty, reality, the good) with men who do not want to marry you and to whom you are not attracted. Evidently, they were an unprepossessing lot. “I thought . . . that I had never seen young men so dingy, so lacking in physical splendour as Thoby’s friends,” Virginia wrote in “Old Bloomsbury” (doubtless exaggerating their nerdishness for comic effect; she wrote the piece to be read aloud to a gathering of Bloomsbury friends that included several of the ill-favored men themselves). But “it was precisely this lack of physical splendour, this shabbiness! that was in my eyes a proof of their superiority. More than that, it was, in some obscure way, reassuring; for it meant that things could go on like this, in abstract argument, without dressing for dinner, and never revert to the ways, which I had come to think so distasteful, at Hyde Park Gate.” However, things could not go on like this; the period of happiness abruptly ended. Once again, as she writes in a later memoir, “A Sketch of the Past” (1940), “the lashes of the random unheeding, unthinking flail,” which had “brutally and pointlessly” destroyed Julia and Stella, descended on the Stephen family. In the fall of 1906, on a trip to Greece with his siblings, Thoby Stephen contracted typhoid and, apparently because of medical bungling (his illness was at first diagnosed as malaria), died a month after his return to England, at the age of twenty-six.
In the annals of Bloomsbury, Thoby’s death, though as brutal and pointless as Julia’s and Stella’s, has not been accorded the same tragic status. Rather, in fact, the annalists have treated it almost as a kind of death of convenience, like the death of a relative who leaves deserving legatees a bequest of such staggering size that his own disappearance from the scene goes almost unnoticed. What happened was this: The previous year, one of the dingy young men, Clive Bell—who was actually neither as dingy nor as intellectual as the rest—had broken ranks and proposed to Vanessa, and she had refused him. Four months before Thoby’s death, he had proposed again, and had again been refused. But now, two days after Thoby’s death, Vanessa accepted him, and two months later she married him. As Leslie Stephen’s death had allowed the children to flee from the ogre’s castle, so Thoby’s death melted the ice princess’s heart. After Clive’s first proposal, Vanessa had written to a friend, “It really seems to matter so very little to oneself what one does. I should be quite happy living with anyone whom I didn’t dislike . . . if I could paint and lead the kind of life I like. Yet for some mysterious reason one has to refuse to do what someone else very much wants one to. It seems absurd. But absurd or not, I could no more marry him than I could fly.” Yet now, in the kind of emotional tour de force usually achieved by love potions, Vanessa’s feeling for Clive suddenly ignited, so that three weeks after the death of her brother she could write to another friend, “I as yet can hardly understand anything but the fact that I am happier than I ever thought people could be, and it goes on getting better every day.”
Quentin Bell, Vanessa’s son, writing of Thoby’s death in his extraordinary biography of his aunt, “Virginia Woolf” (1972), pauses to “wonder what role this masterful and persuasive young man, together with his wife—for he would surely have married—would have played in the life of his sisters.” Quentin then goes on to coolly enumerate the advantages that accrued to the sisters from their brother’s death:
Since Quentin’s own existence was precariously poised on this concatenation of events, he may be forgiven for his rather unfeeling words about his unfortunate uncle. Whether Thoby’s influence on Bloomsbury would in fact have been as baneful as Quentin postulates cannot be known, of course. But this much is clear: the never-never-land household of the four happy orphans had to be broken up (just as the netherworld of Hyde Park Gate had to be fled) if Bloomsbury was to attain the form by which we know it—a coterie of friends gathered around the nucleus of two very peculiar marriages.
After their wedding and honeymoon, in the winter of 1907, Clive and Vanessa took over 46 Gordon Square, and Virginia and Adrian moved to a house in nearby Fitzroy Square. Four years later, on July 3, 1911, another of Thoby’s astonishing Cambridge friends—a “violent trembling misanthropic Jew” who “was as eccentric, as remarkable in his way as Bell and Strachey in theirs”—came to dine with the Bells at Gordon Square; Virginia dropped in after dinner. He was Leonard Woolf, just back from seven years in Ceylon with the Civil Service, and he was stunned by the great changes, the “profound revolution” that had taken place in Gordon Square since he dined there last, in 1904. In “Sowing,” the first volume of his five-volume autobiography—a work of Montaigne-like contemplativeness and poise, published in the sixties, and the overture to the Bloomsbury revival—Leonard recalled his first meeting with the Stephen sisters, in Thoby’s rooms at Cambridge. They were around twenty-one and eighteen, and “in white dresses and large hats, with parasols in their hands, their beauty literally took one’s breath away, for suddenly seeing them one stopped astonished, and everything, including one’s breathing for one second, also stopped as it does when in a picture gallery you suddenly come face to face with a great Rembrandt or Velasquez.” In 1911, Vanessa’s and Virginia’s beauty was undiminished (though Leonard pauses to remark—he writes at the age of eighty-one and has outlived his wife by twenty-one years and his sister-in-law by one—that “Vanessa was, I think, usually more beautiful than Virginia. The form of her features was more perfect, her eyes bigger and better, her complexion more glowing”). But what “was so new and so exhilarating to me in the Gordon Square of July, 1911 was the sense of intimacy and complete freedom of thought and speech, much wider than in the Cambridge of seven years ago, and above all including women.” To understand Leonard’s exhilaration, to see his revolution in action, we must return to Virginia’s “Old Bloomsbury” memoir and a famous passage in it:
“This was an important moment in the history of the mores of Bloomsbury,” Quentin writes in “Virginia Woolf,” and—getting a bit carried away—“perhaps in that of the British middle classes.” By the time Leonard came home from Ceylon, the transformation of the innocent girls in white dresses into women from whose lips the word “bugger” (Bloomsbury’s preferred term for a homosexual) was never far was complete. Indeed, in the case of Virginia such talk was no longer of much moment or interest. She was doing regular reviewing, working on her first novel, finding Adrian irritating as a housemate, and looking for a husband. The society of buggers had, in fact, become “intolerably boring” to her. “The society of buggers has many advantages—if you are a woman,” she allowed. “It is simple, it is honest, it makes one feel, as I noted, in some respects at one’s ease.” But
The married Vanessa, on the other hand, continued to be drawn to queer society. “Did you have a pleasant afternoon buggering one or more of the young men we left for you?” she wrote to John Maynard Keynes in April, 1914. (Keynes was another Cambridge bugger, who had joined the Bloomsbury circle around 1907.) “It must have been delicious,” she went on. “I imagine you . . . with your bare limbs intertwined with him and all the ecstatic preliminaries of Sucking Sodomy—it sounds like the name of a station.” Vanessa’s connection with Duncan Grant, which began during the First World War—he became her life’s companion, even while continuing relationships with a series of boyfriends—has been called tragic; Duncan’s inability to reciprocate Vanessa’s love because he simply wasn’t interested in women has been regarded as one of the sad mischances of her life. But the letter she wrote to Maynard and others of its kind—which appear in Regina Marler’s excellently edited and annotated “Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell” (1993)—give one a whiff of something in Vanessa that may have impelled her to deliberately choose a homosexual as the love of her life; they suggest that Duncan’s homosexuality may have been the very pivot of her interest in him. In a letter to Duncan of January, 1914, Vanessa, bemoaning the British public’s resistance to Post-Impressionist painting, wrote, “I believe distortion is like Sodomy. People are simply blindly prejudiced against it because they think it abnormal.” Vanessa herself seemed almost blindly prejudiced for the abnormal.
But we are getting ahead of our story. Let us return to the scene of the sisters sitting in the drawing room of 46 Gordon Square in the spring of 1908. We will never know how much of Virginia’s account is truth and how much comic invention. (“I do not know if I invented it or not,” she offhandedly remarks, by way of introducing the scene.) But one detail stands out in its probable authenticity: Clive had hidden all the match boxes because their blue and yellow swore with the prevailing colour scheme. Here, we feel, Virginia was reporting accurately. And here, we have to acknowledge, Clive was doing something that, in its way, was quite as remarkable for a man of his background as talking dirty was for girls of Virginia and Vanessa’s background. In his hard-core aestheticism, Clive was behaving as few Victorian men behaved, and as no one in his family had ever behaved. Clive came from a rich family that had made its money from mines in Wales and had built a hideous and pretentious mansion in Wiltshire, decorated with fake-Gothic ornament and animal trophies. Numerous sardonic descriptions of the place have come down to us from Vanessa, who would visit there as a dutiful daughter-in-law and write to Virginia of the “combination of new art and deer’s hoofs.” At Cambridge, Clive had written poetry and hung a Degas reproduction in his rooms but had not got into the Apostles, the secret discussion society that, in the Bloomsbury gospel according to Leonard, was decisive to Bloomsbury’s intellectual and moral avant-gardism. Thoby had not got into the Apostles, either (nor, for that matter, had Leslie Stephen), but Lytton, Maynard, Saxon, Leonard, Morgan (Forster), and Roger (Fry) had.
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Clive was the lightweight of Bloomsbury; today nobody reads his books on art, and his own friends patronized him. When he became engaged to Vanessa, Virginia considered him unworthy. “When I think of father and Thoby and then see that funny little creature twitching his pink skin and jerking out his little spasm of laughter I wonder what odd freak there is in Nessa’s eyesight,” she wrote to Violet Dickinson in December, 1906. In “Virginia Woolf” Quentin writes that Henry James’s “views of the bridegroom were even more unfavourable than those of Virginia in her most hostile moods.” (James was an old family friend of the Leslie Stephens.) Quentin then quotes this passage from a letter of February 17, 1907, that James wrote to a Mrs. W. K. Clifford:
The passage is wonderful (“the hungry futurity of youth”!) but puzzling. Quentin has said that James’s views of Clive were even more unfavorable than Virginia’s, but James says nothing bad about him—he doesn’t single him out from the other callously happy young people. When we read the whole of James’s letter (it appears in Volume IV of Leon Edel’s edition of James’s letters), our puzzlement dissolves. In the sentence immediately preceding this passage James writes:
In his Notes, Quentin thanks Edel for bringing the letter to his attention, but when it comes to the point he can’t avail himself of Edel’s offering. Like Hamlet pulling back from killing Claudius, Quentin cannot commit the parricide of publishing James’s terrible words. However, in leaving the trace, the clue to the uncommitted murder, he has afforded us a rare glimpse into the workshop where biographical narratives are manufactured.
In an earlier work, “Bloomsbury,” published in 1968, Quentin confesses to the sin of discretion. “I have omitted a good deal that I know and much more at which I can guess concerning the private lives of the people whom I shall discuss,” he writes in his introduction, and loftily continues, “This is, primarily, a study in the history of ideas, and although the mœurs of Bloomsbury have to be considered and will in a general way be described, I am not required nor am I inclined to act as Clio’s chambermaid, to sniff into commodes or under beds, to open love-letters or to scrutinise diaries.” But when he accepted the commission from Leonard of writing Virginia’s life, Quentin—obviously aware that the biographer is Clio’s chambermaid—bowed to biography’s lowering imperatives. He wrote of what his mother and his aunt, respectively, called George Duckworth’s “delinquencies” and ‘‘malefactions,’’ and of Gerald Duckworth’s as well: of how during Leslie Stephen’s final illness George would come to Virginia’s bedroom late at night and fling himself on her bed, “cuddling and kissing and otherwise embracing” her, and of how Gerald (according to an early memory of Virginia’s) had stood her on a ledge and, to her lifelong shivering distress, had meddled with her privates. Quentin wrote of an unconsummated but serious (and to his mother seriously wounding) flirtation between Clive and Virginia, which developed during the spring of 1908, when Vanessa was in thrall to her first baby, Julian, and Clive and the still unmarried Virginia would take long walks together to get away from Julian’s nappies and screams. (The fastidious Clive “hated mess—the pissing, puking and slobbering of little children distressed him very much; so did their noise,” his son writes.) He wrote of Virginia and Leonard’s sexual incompatibility. (Like Vanessa, Virginia had initially refused her husband-to-be and, even when she was on the verge of accepting him, had told him of her doubts about “the sexual side of it.” She wrote in a letter of May, 1912, “As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments—when you kissed me the other day was one—when I feel no more than a rock.”) Quentin quoted a letter from Vanessa to Clive written a few months after the Woolfs’ wedding:
What makes Quentin’s biography such a remarkable work—one of the few biographies that overcome the congenital handicaps of the genre—is the force of his personality and the authority of his voice. He is perhaps more a butler than a chambermaid; he is certainly an upper servant. He has been with the family for a great number of years, and he is fiercely, profoundly loyal to it; he knows who are its friends and who its enemies. More important, he knows its members very well. He has carefully studied each of them for years; he has slowly turned their characters over in his mind, knowing their idiosyncrasies and weaknesses. He has been privy to their quarrels—the quarrels by which family life is defined and braced—and he has chosen sides, has discriminated and judged. In making his judgments and discriminations, he has picked up certain habits of mind from the family—habits of mind for which the family is famous—together with a certain tone. “The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power.” This statement, though made by E. M. Forster, might have been made by Quentin (or Vanessa or Virginia or Leonard or Clive or Lytton); it expresses the Bloomsbury ethos and is inflected in the Bloomsbury tone. Forster wrote these words in the essay “What I Believe,” in which he also unforgettably said, “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country,” and held up “an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky.”
Here is how Quentin administers justice to the despicable, power-abusing George Duckworth, who fondled Vanessa as well as Virginia, little thinking that he was earning himself a place in literary history as one of its lowest worms:
When Quentin judges his family, when he feels that one of its members hasn’t behaved well (George wasn’t a true family member), he reproves her (or him) as a nineteenth-century novelist might reprove a heroine (or hero)—as Jane Austen reproves Emma, say, when Emma has been thoughtlessly cruel to Miss Bates. This is the tone Quentin adopts in writing of Virginia’s flirtation with Clive. He writes with a kind of loving disapproval, he feels that the whole thing was wrong, because it was hurtful, but he sympathizes—as Jane Austen sympathized—with the impulse to heedlessly amuse oneself. He also sympathizes with Virginia’s feeling of being left out of her sister’s life after Vanessa’s marriage. “She was not in the least in love with Clive,” Quentin writes. “In so far as she was in love with anyone she was in love with Vanessa. . . . It was because she loved Vanessa so much that she had to injure her, to enter and in entering to break that charmed circle within which Vanessa and Clive were so happy and by which she was so cruelly excluded, and to have Vanessa for herself again by detaching the husband who, after all, was not worthy of her.”
What makes Bloomsbury of such continuing interest to us—why we emit the obligatory groan when the word is uttered but then go out and buy the latest book about Virginia and Vanessa and Leonard and Clive and Lytton and Roger and the rest—is that these people are so alive. The legend of Bloomsbury has taken on the dense complexity of a sprawling nineteenth-century novel, and its characters have become as real to us as the characters in “Emma” and “Daniel Deronda” and “The Eustace Diamonds.” Other early-modernist writers and artists, whose talents were at least equal to the Bloomsbury talents (except for Virginia’s), recede from view, but the Bloomsbury writers and artists grow ever more biographically prominent. Were their lives really so fascinating, or is it simply because they wrote so well and so incessantly about themselves and one another that we find them so? Well, the latter, of course. No life is more interesting than any other life; everybody’s life takes place in the same twenty-four hours of consciousness and sleep; we are all locked into our own subjectivity, and who is to say that the thoughts of a person gazing into the vertiginous depths of a volcano in Sumatra are more objectively interesting than those of a person trying on a dress at Bloomingdale’s? The remarkable collective achievement of the Bloomsbury writers and artists was that they placed in posterity’s hands the documents necessary to engage posterity’s feeble attention—the letters, memoirs, and journals that reveal inner life and compel the sort of helpless empathy that fiction compels.
Toward the end of “A Sketch of the Past,” there is a beautiful and difficult passage about a tendency Virginia has noticed in herself to write about the past in scenes:
At this point, Virginia, like the reader, begins to sense some of the problems with the passage: the confusion between “scene-making” and “scene-receiving” (which is it?) and the wobbliness of the word “reality,” which totters from “what it is convenient to call reality” to plain “reality” to “ ‘reality.’ ” “These are questions about reality, about scenes and their connection with writing to which I have no answer; nor time to put the question carefully,” she writes, and adds, “Perhaps if I should revise and rewrite as I intend, I will make the question more exact; and worry out something by way of answer.” Virginia died before she could revise and rewrite the passage, and students of autobiography and biography are still worrying the subject of “reality” versus reality—the made versus the received. But there is no question that the hyper-reality of the famous scenes in the Bloomsbury legend, like those of classical fiction, derives from a common artistic tradition and from certain technologies of storytelling, by which the wrought is made to appear as if it were the received. We call the tradition Realism; the technologies are unnameable.
Virginia wrote “A Sketch of the Past” in spurts, between April, 1939, and November, 1940, as a diversion from a project that was giving her trouble—her biography of Roger Fry, the critic and painter who had introduced Post-Impressionist art to England. After writing the passage about scenes, she put the “Sketch” aside for a month, and when she returned to it she felt constrained to add, “Scenes, I note, seldom illustrate my relation with Vanessa; it has been too deep for ‘scenes.’ ”
Virginia and Vanessa’s relationship was deep indeed—perhaps the deepest of all the Bloomsbury relationships. But it was not, in fact, impervious to—“too deep for”—Virginia’s scenic imagination. In a letter to Violet Dickinson, for example, she gives this picture of Vanessa a month before her marriage, as she observed her in Bath walking down the street arm in arm with Clive:
It is the implicit comparison between the watcher and the watched, between the fragile and wistful Virginia and the powerful and sexually magnetic Vanessa, that gives the scene its novelistic shimmer. In Virginia’s vision of her sister—it gleams out of her letters and diaries—Vanessa is a Kate Croy or Charlotte Stant to her own Milly Theale or Maggie Verver; she has not only the physical magnificence of James’s wonderful “bad” heroines, whose robust beauty and splendid bearing so pointedly contrast with the slouching delicacy of the “good” heroines, but also their double-edged single-mindedness. (“You are much simpler than I am,” Virginia wrote to Vanessa in August, 1909. “How do you manage to see only one thing at a time? Without any of those reflections that distract me so much and make people call me bad names? I suppose you are, as Lytton once said, the most complete human being of us all; and your simplicity is really that you take in much more than I do, who intensify atoms.”) Although it was Virginia/Milly/Maggie who had wronged Vanessa/Kate/Charlotte in the Clive affair, Virginia never ceased to feel obscurely wronged by her sister; she perpetually compared herself to Vanessa and found herself wanting. In June, 1929, when she and Leonard joined Vanessa and Duncan in the South of France, she wrote in her diary of buying furniture and crockery for her country house in England; although it gave her pleasure, it “set my dander up against Nessa’s almost overpowering supremacy. My elder son is coming tomorrow; yes, & he is the most promising young man in King’s; & has been speaking at the Apostles’ dinner. All I can oppose that with is, And I made £2,000 out of Orlando & can bring Leonard here & buy a house if I want. To which she replies (in the same inaudible way) I am a failure as a painter compared with you, & can’t do more than pay for my models. And so we go on; over the depths of our childhood.”
In 1926, after going to a show of Vanessa’s paintings, Virginia wrote to her sister, “I am amazed, a little alarmed (for as you have the children, the fame by rights belongs to me) by your combination of pure artistic vision and brilliance of imagination.” Of course, it is the parenthetical remark that leaps out of the passage. The fame is a poor thing, a devalued second best to the children. Vanessa is always the alarmingly invulnerable big sister, even though Virginia is capable of condescending to her when she feels particularly provoked. “What you miss [in Clive] is inspiration of any kind,” she complained to Violet Dickinson, adding, “But then old Nessa is no genius.” Vanessa would have been the first to agree; extreme modesty about her intellectual, and even her artistic, attainments was one of her outstanding traits—and perhaps only added to her insufferable superiority in the eyes of her sister. In a memoir called “Reminiscences,” addressed to the yet unborn Julian, Virginia shows us Vanessa behaving in girlhood as she would throughout her life: “When she won the prize at her drawing school, she hardly knew, so shy was she, at the recognition of a secret, how to tell me, in order that I might repeat the news at home. ‘They’ve given me the thing—I don’t know why.’ ‘What thing?’ ‘O they say I’ve won it—the book—the prize you know.’ ”
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 the 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 nineteen-eighties 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 merely imagine; they can now actually enter the rooms where some of the most dramatic scenes took place, can look out of 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 has been educated by Paris ateliers and villas in the South of France and is not gladdened by English prettiness. But it is also the 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 an 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-crazed 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 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 workplaces—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 Post-Impressionist 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 “Christopher”s and “Janet”s as well as with “Clive”s and “Duncan”s and “Maynard”s—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 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 farmwork. 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 an 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, quotes a rather awful entry in Duncan’s diary of 1918, written during a five-day absence of Bunny’s:
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 the strange one, and in the nineteen-twenties 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:
Vanessa replied to this piece of flowery piety in prose as crushingly simple and elegant as the black velvet gown Anna Karenina wore to the fateful opening ball:
In her reply, poor Madge put her foot in it even further by saying she had not wanted to pry, oh, no—“I am too saddened by contact with mean, sometimes cruel & inquisitive minds to entertain any sort of mere idle ‘curiosity’ myself”—but had written only from the Purest of Motives, “out of a sort of passionate longing to help those I love.”
Vanessa, roused to even greater heights of weary contempt, replied:
Vanessa writes wonderfully not only when she is eating someone alive, like Madge Vaughan, but throughout the volume of her letters. “You have a touch in letter-writing that is beyond me. Something unexpected, like coming round a corner in a rose garden and finding it still daylight,” Virginia wrote her in August, 1908, and the description is right. About her own letters Virginia wrote, “I am either too formal, or too feverish,” and she is right there, too. Virginia was the great novelist, but Vanessa was the natural letter writer; she had a gift for letter writing just as she had for making houses beautiful and agreeable. Virginia’s letters have passages that surpass anything Vanessa could have written—set pieces that shimmer with her febrile genius—but they lack the ease and unself-consciousness (the qualities on which the epistolary genre draws for its life as a literary genre) by which Vanessa’s are consistently marked.
Regina Marler, with her selections, has created a kind of novel-in-letters counterpart of Frances Spalding’s sympathetic biography. Each letter illustrates a facet of Vanessa’s character and advances the plot of her life. Her relationships with Virginia, Clive, Roger, Duncan, and Julian—the novel-in-letters’ other main characters—are revealed in moving fullness. The death of Julian, at the age of twenty-nine, in the Spanish Civil War, is the dreadful event toward which the plot inexorably moves. On July 18, 1937, during the battle of Brunete, he was hit by shrapnel and died of his wounds. Reading Vanessa’s letters to him in the two years before his death in the knowledge of what is coming is almost unbearable. In a letter written to him in China, where he was teaching, she writes, “Oh Julian, I can never express what happiness you’ve given me in my life. I often wonder how such luck has fallen my way. Just having children seemed such incredible delight, but that they should care for me as you make me feel you do, is something beyond all dreaming of—or even wanting. I never expected it or hoped for it, for it seemed enough to care so much oneself.” A year later, when he has begun to make plans to go to Spain, she writes, “I woke . . . from an awful nightmare about you, thinking you were dead, and waking saying ‘Oh, if only it could all be a dream.’ ” In July, 1937, when, in spite of her anguished arguments, he has gone to Spain, she writes a long witty letter about gatherings at Charleston and in London attended by, among others, Leonard, Virginia, Quentin, Angelica, T. S. Eliot, and Henri Matisse, and also by James, Dorothy, Pippa, Jane, and Pernel Strachey (“There was slightly overwhelming Strachey atmosphere”), and holds up as “extraordinarily sane and unanswerable” an article by Maynard in The New Statesman replying to Auden’s poem “Spain” and asserting the primacy of “the claims of Peace.” Reading the next letter in the book, dated August 11th, to Ottoline Morrell, is unbearable:
In another short letter, written five days later, Vanessa acknowledges a condolence from Vita Sackville-West (her sister’s former lover) and says, “I cannot ever say how Virginia has helped me. Perhaps some day, not now, you will be able to tell her it’s true.” After Virginia’s suicide, in March, 1941, Vanessa wrote to Vita again, and came back to her letter of August, 1937. “I remember sending that message by you. I think I had a sort of feeling that it would have more effect if you gave it and I expect I was right. How glad I am you gave it. I remember all those days after I heard about Julian lying in an unreal state and hearing her voice going on and on keeping life going as it seemed when otherwise it would have stopped, and late every day she came to see me here, the only point in the day one could want to come.” Virginia noted in her diary in September, 1937, “Nessa’s little message: to me so profoundly touching, thus sent secretly via Vita that I have ‘helped’ her more than she can say.” The reversal of roles—Virginia now the strong dispenser of comfort and stability to the pitifully broken Vanessa—is one of the most beautiful and interesting moments in the Bloomsbury novel. Vanessa’s inability to tell Virginia directly of her love and gratitude is a measure of the depth of her reserve, the quality that gave her character its immense authority and her household its improbable peacefulness, which strangers sometimes mistook for hauteur, and her sister—emotional, wildly imaginative—for indifference.
“I thought when Roger died that I was unhappy,” the devastated Vanessa said to Virginia after Julian’s death. Vanessa’s affair with Roger had begun in 1911 and had painfully (for him) ended in 1913, but, like Clive, Roger remained in Vanessa’s orbit and continued to function in her life as one of its fundamental structures. As well as a lover, he had been a mentor and a decisive artistic influence. His Post-Impressionist show of 1910 had introduced the then difficult art of Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Picasso, and Matisse, among others, to an obligingly derisive English public. (“The exhibition is either an extremely bad joke or a swindle,” Wilfrid Blunt wrote in his diary. “The drawing is on the level of that of an untaught child of seven or eight years old, the sense of colour that of a tea-tray painter, the method that of a schoolboy who wipes his fingers on a slate after spitting on them.”) Perhaps the most remarkable of Vanessa’s letters to Roger is one she wrote in November, 1918 (from Charleston, in the last month of her pregnancy with Angelica), recalling “that first part of our affair,” which was
Roger’s death, in 1934, of a heart attack after a fall, is almost as afflicting as Julian’s; Lytton’s, in 1932, of stomach cancer, is scarcely less so. Vanessa’s letters make us care about these long-dead real people in the way novelists make us care about their newly minted imaginary characters. We weep unashamedly when we read Vanessa’s letters reaching out to Dora Carrington, the woman who had been hopelessly in love with Lytton, as Vanessa was in love with Duncan, and to Helen Anrep, who had become Roger’s companion after he got over Vanessa. Why do books of letters move us as biographies do not? When we are reading a book of letters, we understand the impulse to write biographies, we feel the intoxication the biographer feels in working with primary sources, the rapture of firsthand encounters with another’s lived experience. But this intoxication, this rapture, does not carry over into the text of the biography; it dies on the way. Here, for example, is Virginia writing to Lytton from Cornwall in April, 1908:
And here is Frances Spalding:
Or Vanessa writing to Clive on October 12, 1921:
And Spalding:
There is nothing wrong with what Spalding has written in these extracts. They illustrate normal biographical method. The genre (like its progenitor, history) functions as a kind of processing plant where experience is converted into information the way fresh produce is converted into canned vegetables. But, like canned vegetables, biographical narratives are so far removed from their source—so altered from the plant with soil clinging to its roots that is a letter or a diary entry—that they carry little conviction. When Virginia complains to Lytton (another high-strung, single, childless intellectual) about what a nuisance the baby is, her voice carries great conviction, and so does Vanessa’s when she proudly exclaims over her young son’s aestheticism to his aesthete father. When Spalding writes, “In Cornwall both were infuriated,” and “On the journey out her chief pleasure lay,” we do not quite believe her. Taken from its living context, and with its blood drained out of it, the “information” of biography is a shrivelled, spurious thing. The canniest biographers, aware of the problem, rush massive transfusions of quotation to the scene. The biographies that give the greatest illusion of life, the fullest sense of their subject, are those which quote the most. Spalding’s biography is one of these, as is Quentin’s—though Quentin, in any case, is exempt from the above criticisms, because his nephew’s and son’s voice carries the authority that no stranger-biographer’s voice can. His acute critical intelligence is always being inflected by a fond familial feeling; this does not so much blunt his judgments as give them a kind of benign finality. (When Virginia once characterized an affectionate letter of Quentin’s mother as “exquisitely soft and just, like the fall of a cat’s paw,” she could have been describing her nephew’s biography.)
The judgments of Quentin’s half sister Angelica have a rather different atmosphere. Angelica appears in Vanessa’s letters and Virginia’s diaries as a radiant, impish child, and then as a beautiful, piquant young woman—a kind of crown of Vanessa’s maternal achievement, the lovely flower who provided the “feminine element” (as Vanessa termed it) that the family required to reach its final perfection. But in her book, “Deceived with Kindness” (1984), Angelica, now a rather defeated older woman, comes forward to correct our admiring vision of Vanessa and to bring the Bloomsbury legend into line with our blaming and self-pitying times. Angelica is a kind of reincarnation of Madge Vaughan; what Madge adumbrated in her piously accusing letters to Vanessa, Angelica elaborates in her angry and aggrieved book about Vanessa. Madge felt that she could not bring her husband and children to live in a house of such irregularity; Angelica confirms her misgivings. Bloomsbury bohemianism was evidently lost on its youngest heir, who never felt at ease in her family, and would have infinitely preferred to grow up in a household like Madge’s, where the children came first and you were unlikely to one day discover that your mother’s lover was your real father. The relationship of Duncan and Vanessa—regarded by Spalding and other Bloomsbury aficionados as a testament to Vanessa’s magisterial free-spiritedness and as an extraordinarily fruitful artistic union—is regarded by Angelica as simply disreputable and pathological. (“There must have been a strong element of masochism in her love for him, which induced her to accept a situation which did permanent harm to her self-respect. . . . She gained companionship with a man she loved on terms unworthy of her whole self.”) In 1917, Roger wrote to Vanessa, “You have done such an extraordinarily difficult thing without any fuss, but thro’ all the conventions kept friends with a pernickety creature like Clive, got quit of me and yet kept me your devoted friend, got all the things you need for your own development and yet managed to be a splendid mother. . . . You have genius in your life as well as in your art and both are rare things.” Angelica denies that Vanessa was a splendid mother, and believes that Vanessa’s life was a shambles. Her book introduces into the Bloomsbury legend a most jarring shift in perspective. Until the publication of “Deceived with Kindness” that was the legend had a smooth, unbroken surface. Efforts from the outside to penetrate it—I think of books like Louise DeSalvo’s “Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work” (1989) and Roger Poole’s less crude but almost as dark and accusing “The Unknown Virginia Woolf” (1978)—succeeded no better than did Madge’s and other interfering busybodies’ attempts to “help” where no help had been requested.
But Angelica’s attack from within is something else. It is a primary document; it cannot be pushed aside, unpleasant and distasteful though it is to see a minor character arise from her corner and proceed to put herself in the center of a rather marvellous story that now threatens to become ugly. An unhappy Quentin attempted to do a little damage control in a review of “Deceived with Kindness” that was first published in Books and Bookmen and then in the Charleston Newsletter. Treading carefully (“Ought a brother to review his sister’s book? Certainly it is an awkward undertaking, made all the more awkward when, as in the present instance, one cannot but express admiration”) but firmly (“To say that this is an honest narrative is not to say that it is accurate”), Quentin tries to correct the correction and restore the Bloomsbury story to its old dignity and high style. Occasionally, his irritation with his irritating little sister gets the better of his tact, as when he notes, “My sister was the only young person I then [in the thirties] knew who seemed to take not the slightest interest in politics.” He goes on:
More than anything else, it is the tone of Angelica’s book that sets it apart from other Bloomsbury texts. The note of irony—perhaps because it resounded too insistently in her ears when she was growing up—is entirely absent from her text, an absence that brings into relief Bloomsbury’s characteristic obliqueness. Virginia, writing of sorrows at least as afflicting as Angelica’s, never allows her stoicism to falter, and rarely fails to hang on to some shred of her natural gaiety. Her niece writes under the inspiration of different spirits. When Angelica says that Vanessa
we withhold our sympathy—as we withheld it from Madge Vaughan—not because her grievance is without merit but because her language is without force. As Madge cloaked and muffled the complexity and legitimacy of her fears for her children in the ornate pieties of the Victorian period (which she had brought with her into the nineteen-twenties), so Angelica cloaks and muffles the complexity and legitimacy of her fury at her mother in the streamlined truisms of the age of mental health.
The man Angelica married (and separated from after many unhappy years) was—the reader who doesn’t already know this will fall out of his chair—Bunny Garnett. On the day Angelica was born, Bunny, who was then ensconced at Charleston as Duncan’s lover, wrote to Lytton about the new baby, “Its beauty is the remarkable thing about it. I think of marrying it; when she is twenty I shall be 46—will it be scandalous?” That Bunny’s prophecy should have come true is a twist that seems to belong to another plot, but that Bunny and Angelica gravitated toward each other is not so remarkable. Like Angelica, Bunny never really belonged among the Bloomsbury aristocrats. Vanessa put up with him because of Duncan; Lytton and Virginia jeered at his (now hopelessly dated) novels. (In her diary for 1925, Virginia quotes Lytton on Bunny’s latest work: “Really it’s very extraordinary—so arty,—so composed—the competence terrific, but . . . well, it’s like a perfectly restored Inn—Ye Olde Cocke and Balls, everything tidied up & restored.”) Bunny’s three-volume autobiography is permeated with complacency and an air of bogusness. Every literary society has its Bunny, it seems; so often the least talented member comes forward as its noisiest, and most knowing, self-appointed and self-important spokesman.
In what I have written, in separating my Austenian heroines and heroes from my Gogolian flat characters, I have, like every other biographer, conveniently forgotten that I am not writing a novel, and that it really isn’t for me to say who is good and who is bad, who is noble and who is faintly ridiculous. Life is infinitely less orderly and more bafflingly ambiguous than any novel, and if we pause to remember that Madge and Bunny, and even George and Gerald Duckworth, were actual, multidimensional individuals, whose parents loved them and whose lives were of inestimable preciousness to themselves, we have to face the problem that every biographer faces and none can solve; namely, that he is standing in quicksand as he writes. There is no floor under his enterprise, no basis for moral certainty. Every character in a biography contains within himself or herself the potential for a reverse image. The finding of a new cache of letters, the stepping forward of a new witness, the coming into fashion of a new ideology—all these events, and particularly the last one, can destabilize any biographical configuration, overturn any biographical consensus, transform any good character into a bad one, and vice versa. The manuscript of “Deceived with Kindness” was made available to Frances Spalding during the writing of her biography of Vanessa, and though she does not ignore it, she chooses not to allow it to sour her affectionate portrait. Another biographer might have made—as a subsequent biographer may well make—a different choice. The distinguished dead are clay in the hands of writers, and chance determines the shapes that their actions and characters assume in the books written about them.
After my inspection of the Charleston house, a walk in the walled garden (which somehow seemed warmer than the icy house), and a visit to the gift shop, I rejoined Christopher Naylor and, as had been arranged, we drove off for tea with Anne Olivier Bell, Quentin’s wife, who is known as Olivier. Quentin would not be at tea, Christopher told me; he was frail and napped in the afternoon. The couple live in a house a mile away, which, like Charleston, is on a huge estate belonging to a Lord Gage, who has managed to hang on to his property (is this why one thinks of “The Cherry Orchard” while at Charleston?) and is one of the supporters of the Charleston Trust. When we arrived at the Bell house, at about four-thirty, it was already dark. Olivier ushered us into a large, warm room, with a kitchen at one end and, at the other, a fireplace in which a fire was robustly burning. A long wooden table stood in front of the fire. Olivier is a tall, vigorous woman in her late seventies, with an appealing shy friendliness. One is immediately drawn to her warmth and naturalness, her sensible and matter-of-fact manner, her extreme niceness. She put a kettle on the hob and then showed me (as if this were what her visitors expected) various paintings by Bloomsbury artists. One was a large portrait of Vanessa in a red evening dress with one arm raised voluptuously over her head, painted by Duncan in 1915, and another was Vanessa’s portrait of Quentin as a little boy of eight, looking up in the act of writing in a notebook. Neither of these paintings nor any of the others was hung to advantage: the portrait of Vanessa was in a hallway at the bottom of a staircase, on a wall too small for it, and the portrait of Quentin, though not quite so badly placed, was not right, either. In “Deceived with Kindness” Angelica bitterly writes of how “appearances of a purely aesthetic kind were considered of supreme importance” at Charleston (“Hours were spent hanging an old picture in a new place, or in choosing a new colour for the walls”), while she herself was allowed to go out into the world unbrushed and unwashed. Quentin and Olivier’s house was entirely without the aestheticism of Charleston. It was comfortable, pleasant, and inviting but aesthetically unremarkable: this was not where their interests lay. Vanessa’s dining-room table at Charleston was round, and she had painted a design on it in yellow, gray, and pink evocative of the covers she did for Virginia’s Hogarth Press books, which for some readers are inextricably bound up with the experience of reading Virginia’s novels and essays. Quentin and Olivier’s table was plain scrubbed wood. Olivier served tea at this table in large earthenware mugs, made by Quentin, who, in addition to writing, painting, and teaching, is a potter.
We heard some thumping overhead, and Olivier said, “That’s Quentin,” and he presently appeared—drawn by curiosity, perhaps. He is a tall man with white hair and a white beard, and he was wearing an artist’s smock the color of his blue eyes, which looked at one with a direct, calm gaze. He walked with a cane, with some difficulty. Like Olivier, Quentin immediately pulled one into his orbit of decency, sanity, wholesomeness, fineness. He had a bit of an aura. I asked him what he had thought of Angelica’s book. He laughed, and said he had been irritated by Angelica’s telling stories he would have wanted to tell himself and getting them wrong, missing the point. He said that the book had been a part of her therapy, and that today she would rewrite it if she could. I asked him a question about Clive. During my tour of Charleston, I had been struck by the amount of space Clive occupied in the house—he had a downstairs study, an upstairs library, a bedroom, and his own bathroom—and had noted the special character of his rooms. They aren’t out of character with the rest of the place—they are decorated with Duncan and Vanessa’s usual painted panels, windowsills, bedboards, and bookcases—but they are more elegant and more luxurious. The bedroom has an expensive carpet and a pair of ornate Venetian chairs; the study has an elaborate early-nineteenth-century marquetry table. (It had been a wedding present to Clive and Vanessa from his parents.) Clive had evidently wanted his little comforts and conveniences, and had got them. Everybody except poor Angelica seemed to have got what he or she wanted at Charleston. (“The atmosphere was one of liberty and order,” Angelica’s daughter Henrietta Garnett has written of visits to Charleston during her childhood.) Quentin said of Clive that he was an extremely complex person, and that he had been very fond of him and had taken great pleasure in his company until they fell out over politics.
“Clive was conservative?” I asked. (I had not yet read Quentin’s “Bloomsbury,” in which he writes sharply of Clive’s book “Civilisation,” published in 1928: “It seemed that Clive Bell felt it more important to know how to order a good meal than to know how to lead a good life,” and “Clive Bell sees civilisation as something that exists only in an élite and from which the helots who serve that élite are permanently excluded. The manner in which civilisation is to be preserved is immaterial; if it can be maintained by a democracy so much the better, but there is no fundamental objection to a tyranny so long as it maintains a cultured class with unearned incomes.”)
“Conservative is putting it very mildly,” Quentin said. “You could almost say he was Fascistic.”
“Then he and Julian must have fallen out even more,” I said.
“Well, no,” Quentin said. He explained that he himself was the more left-wing of the brothers—in fact, the most left-wing of all the Bloomsbury set, though he had never joined the Communist Party.
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 to Julian. 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 dissertation 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 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, ochre, and blue. The book is a volume of the 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—artmaking 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 am 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) insure 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 a part of its beauty. ♦
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