7 A Writer’s Holiday 1927–1928
To many of Virginia Woolf’s literary admirers, the appearance of Orlando in 1928, a year after To the Lighthouse, was a shock. The whole tone of it was different from her previous novels. The writer Elizabeth Bowen remembered her surprise: ‘This Orlando – we did not care for the sound of it. The book was, we gathered, in the nature of a prank, or a private joke; worse still, its genesis was personal.’ The Virginia Woolf they had previously admired was remote and impersonal. ‘We visualised her less as a woman at work than as a light widening as it brightened […] Seldom can a living artist have been so – literally – idealized.’1 Orlando did not fit.
The abstract idea of Woolf still dominates many readings of her, and for good reason, but part of Woolf’s appeal is her tremendous variety. When she finished To the Lighthouse, after six months of retyping and ‘screwing her brain’ to the task of revision, she wanted a break. She wanted to write something quickly and for fun. ‘I feel in need of an escapade’, she wrote in March 1927, and after a summer of reviewing she was able, in the autumn, to take off.2 At first she conceived a book about her friends, including Vita as ‘Orlando, a nobleman’.3 Orlando the nobleman quickly took over the whole enterprise, and in October Woolf was writing very fast with ‘the greatest rapture’. By March the first draft was finished and she was looking back with satisfaction on ‘a writer’s holiday’.4
From now on Woolf would often have something fun on the go to keep herself afloat. Flush, her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, would be a rest after The Waves and Between the Acts, a ‘holiday’ from writing her life of Roger Fry. But we need not put any of these on a separate shelf. There is plenty of holiday spirit in Woolf’s most intensely lyric novels. Look for the author of Orlando in To the Lighthouse and the dashing social comedy comes leaping into view. It is still perhaps the most underestimated aspect of that much-discussed novel: Mr Ramsay seeing all humanity rayed out among the geranium leaves, or Charles Tansley asking, ‘did one like his tie?’ – and ‘God knows, said Rose, one did not.’5
Virginia Woolf’s wit was addictive and formidable. Her jokes, like most jokes, had to be quick, and she wanted Orlando to be ‘written as I write letters at the top of my speed’.6 The novel was, from the first, connected with the skimming, glittering voice of her correspondence – especially her long, sexy, teasing letters to Vita Sackville-West. Each was a game of close reading, where the words stood in lieu of the body: ‘Read between the lines, donkey West; put on your horn spectacles, and the arid ridges of my prose will be seen to flower like the desert in spring: cyclamens, violets, all a growing, all a blowing.’7 This is the voice that takes us on the wild-goose chase of Orlando, beckoning us on through an accumulation of rapid-flowering details, spinning out fantasies with unruffled composure, sub-clause after sub-clause, moving so fast that we can’t possibly stop to protest, until at last we reach the end of a paragraph with a flirtatious dot-dot-dot.
The comedy of Orlando comes as no surprise to the reader of her letters; and in its themes too it is intricately connected with Woolf’s other work. In a tone ‘half laughing, half serious’, it asks the same enduring questions.8 How different are men and women? Did our ancestors experience life in the same ways as us? What do we inherit from our family pasts? That last question links Woolf’s project of family history in To the Lighthouse with her fantasizing of Sackville-West’s ancestors in Orlando. Both are books about inheritance, asking how much is set down from the start and how far we are free to invent ourselves. Orlando is her ancestors, but she also remakes herself with each passing century.
Vita Sackville-West posing as ‘Orlando about the year 1840’. ‘Do you exist?’ Woolf wondered in a letter of March 1928; ‘Have I made you up?’ (Vita Sackville West from Orlando, A Biography, by Virginia Woolf, London 1928)
Vanessa Bell’s endpapers for Flush, Woolf’s biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog. (Vanessa Bell, endpapers for Flush by Virginia Woolf, London 1933 © Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy Henrietta Garnett)
It is a sign of Woolf’s confidence that Orlando not only connects with previous novels but makes a public joke of her famous style. There is, for example, a parody of the ‘Time Passes’ section from To the Lighthouse, and in a way the whole book was a riff on the ‘flight of time’ which her friends had once dared her to write. Woolf was parodying herself in other ways too, caricaturing herself as much as Vita. Orlando is visited by the great poet Nick Greene, who cuts a shabby figure at the dining table, talking about his illnesses, invoking literary glory in a bad French accent, and dismissing all other writers of his generation, who happen to be Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Donne. Woolf (whose spoken French was never a strong point) was thoroughly self-knowing about her dismissal of Joyce. And she knew she had slighted Vita’s poetry: poor Orlando can’t get a word in edgeways about his own writing, but is so unaccountably enchanted that he goes on listening until Greene gets fed up with rural life and goes back to London where he belongs – and where, dipping his pen into the eggcup that serves for an inkpot, he proceeds to write a satire on his ill-used country host.9
Though the book was not the ‘outline of her friends’ that Woolf first conceived (that idea branched off into The Waves), Orlando was shaped by her long friendship with Lytton Strachey. For twenty years they had been showing off, outwitting each other, competing for sexual shock value. A gender-changing fantasy stood a good chance of rivalling Strachey’s famous openness about ‘buggery’; and a 500-year biography might challenge even such a controversial form of life-writing as Strachey had practised in Eminent Victorians, where a telling anecdote or two might replace volumes of pious detail. Strachey thought Woolf had chosen the wrong kind of subject matter in her novels and should try something more like Tristram Shandy, which is exactly what she did in Orlando. She reread Sterne’s comic epic in 1926 and borrowed its penchant for mock prefaces and indexes, tantalizing gaps, double entendres, documents scorched in the middle of the most important sentence. Tristram has difficulty getting born; Orlando shows no prospect of dying.
So Orlando was an answer to Lytton. But it was first and foremost an extended letter to Vita, designed for the world to read. Woolf began it just as the closest phase of their affair was coming to an end. Vita, though still devoted, saw that Virginia could give no long-term sexual commitment, and was turning to other women for the stable intimacy she wanted. Orlando was a kind of consolation to both of them for the fact that they would not go on being lovers; it was also Woolf’s way of managing her jealousy, fondly punishing Vita, and paying tribute to what they had had. Since Christmas 1925 there had been days when Vita was ‘pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung’; she had brought with her into Virginia’s life ‘the glow & the flattery & the festival’.10 There had been long periods during Vita’s trips abroad when Virginia played the pining lover waiting ‘doggedly, dismally, faithfully’ for her return, frightened by the strength of her own feeling.11 They had talked by the fire, and very occasionally they had slept together. ‘Twice’, Vita said, though this was in a letter to her husband, to whom she swore that her love was more ‘spiritual’ than sexual.12 It may well have been the truth: certainly Vita was anxious about making Virginia ill. For her part, Virginia understood this danger well. Both had, at a certain point, held back:
Talking to Lytton the other night he suddenly asked me to advise him in love – whether to go on, over the precipice, or stop short at the top. Stop, stop! I cried, thinking instantly of you. Now what would happen if I let myself go over? Answer me that. Over what? you’ll say. A precipice marked V.13
Lytton Strachey, Woolf’s great friend, rival, and literary accomplice. He is painted here by Dora Carrington, with whom he lived at Tidmarsh Mill and later Ham Spray House. (Dora Carrington. Lytton Strachey)
There was too much to lose in going over. By the end of 1927 Woolf was safe, and could enjoy the vertigo of the precipice by writing it out in Orlando. The novel castigates prudery, while all the time revelling in concealments more fulsome than furbelows. Body parts are glimpsed one at a time. Like the sixteenth-century love poems that praise a mistress’s eyes, mouth, neck, cheek all separately, the narrative eye of Orlando keeps homing in on a hand or a foot. Orlando’s legs are mentioned unreasonably often. ‘A thousand pities that such a pair of legs should leave the country’, sighs Nell Gwyn as Orlando sets off for Constantinople; and when he becomes a woman Orlando has to be careful because, should her legs be exposed for a moment, any passing sailor might be so distracted as to fall head first from his mast.14
Woolf’s sensuality, as usual, is not in the strip but the tease. This was her preference, but it was also a practical tactic, since it allowed her to publish a lengthy celebration of a lesbian at a time when the most dully unerotic of lesbian novels (most notably Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness) were falling prey to the censors. Through a series of events made by Virginia Woolf’s cunning to look like her hero’s pure good luck, Orlando never actually falls in love with anyone who happens to be of the same sex: s/he changes in tune with her suitors.
Virginia’s sense of Vita as a woman capable of being many selves at once (wife, mother, lover, man, woman, writer, gardener, aristocrat, gypsy) was the inspiration for a fictional shape-shifter who plays out hundreds of roles across the centuries, adapting to different societies, and yet all along being unmistakably herself. The novel rejoices in metamorphoses worthy of Ovid, from the transformations of Orlando herself to the woman from Norwich who turns to dust in the frost. The spirit of Shakespearean comedy is always close to the surface, bringing with it a joyous web of disguises and confusions. In sending Orlando off as Extraordinary Ambassador to Constantinople in the seventeenth century, Woolf was thinking of Vita’s time in Persia, where her husband Harold Nicolson was posted as a diplomat. But she was also alluding to an exotic strain in Vita that reached much further back – to her grandmother Pepita, a Spanish dancer descended from gypsies.15 Accordingly, Orlando joins the gypsies for a time, playing (in Shakespearean tradition) aristocrat and outlaw at once.
When Vita went off travelling, Virginia generally stayed in England and wrote letters about the beauty of an English spring. But there was plenty of the roaming spirit in Virginia, and Orlando’s adventurous shape-shifting is hers as well. There had been the succession of European trips in her twenties, to Turkey, Greece, Italy. After Mrs Dalloway there was a long stay with Brenan in the Sierra Nevada in Spain (reached after days of plodding though the desert on mules); when Vanessa started to spend chunks of the year in the south of France, Leonard and Virginia got into the habit of taking holidays in Cassis, near Marseilles. They went in 1927, 1928, and 1929, enjoying the warmth and the pace of life. Virginia was so taken with it that she started house-hunting, arranged to buy a small villa, and had some furniture shipped over before Leonard managed to persuade her of the impracticalities of owning a house many hundred miles from where they worked. In subsequent years there were adventures with the Frys in Greece and tipsy nights of Chianti in Italy. Woolf’s ready fund of metaphors always took on local colour. After a holiday in Spain writing itself was mere ‘tossing of omelettes’.16 Wherever she was, Woolf pledged her enduring love of it. She wanted to catch every new sight and sensation in words. Rattling along on the train home from Greece, she was still writing, writing, writing until her eyes were sore. She would never be at home abroad in the way that both Vanessa and Vita were, but the sun brought out in her a whole new stream of fantasies.
Roger Fry, View of Cassis, 1925. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant built a house in Cassis and the Woolfs went out to join them for a series of holidays in the 1920s. Moths flying, frogs croaking, warmth, light, food: Virginia enjoyed it so much that she almost bought a house there. (Roger Fry, View of Cassis, 1925. Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris)
In late October 1928, just after the publication of Orlando, Woolf gave the much-mythologized lectures at Cambridge which developed into her book-length essay A Room of One’s Own. It is one of the most celebrated and controversial discussions of women’s liberty, and its power comes largely from its methods of suggestion and indirection. The style owed much to the mischievous methods of her holiday novel: doodling, humming, eating and drinking, whisking up an imagined biography of Shakespeare’s sister. But it is also about what it says it’s about: the need for a woman to have money and a room of her own. Woolf argues quite plainly for the importance of those material comforts which allow a woman to concentrate her energies in her intellectual life (since it is hard to write poetry when you are cold, or interrupted, or need to make a pie). She also argues unashamedly for the pleasure of material comforts per se. Why shouldn’t a woman have a decent dinner and a good chair to sit in? she asks, contrasting the meagre prunes at a women’s college with the splendid food that the men enjoyed just down the road.
Her own capacity to make money was a deep source of satisfaction, and she wanted to translate her money into life-enhancing things. She never stopped wondering at the alchemy by which the products of her imagination turned into vases or chairs: Mrs Dalloway bought a bathroom at Monk’s House and two WCs (one of which was called Mrs Dalloway’s Lavatory); To the Lighthouse bought a car. Like the excellent lunch in A Room of One’s Own, the car encourages the expansiveness of mind that might result in good writing. We can feel the effects of the Woolfs’ Singer car (called The Lighthouse) in the pages of Orlando. Scenes flash by, the world opens up. Virginia never mastered the art of driving, despite lessons with Vita in Kensington Gardens; after a few hair-raising outings Leonard firmly took the wheel. But the car made Virginia feel freer than ever before. Next, with the proceeds of Orlando, she had a new bedroom built for herself at Monk’s House: the room of one’s own in which to write and dream.
Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, the home of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West from 1930. (Photo Edwin Smith)
The idea of literary inheritance in A Room of One’s Own is like the continuity of bloodlines in Orlando. Just as Orlando in the present day holds within her all the experiences of her Renaissance self, so Virginia Woolf is also Shakespeare’s sister, carrying on the same work, building on the foundations laid by that obscure woman whose world would not let her write. Woolf’s response in A Room of One’s Own to her literary forebears is her autobiography as much as her family memoir is her autobiography. For all her competitiveness, Woolf felt profoundly a sense of shared endeavour and familial connection. ‘Books continue each other,’ she says, ‘in spite of our habit of judging them separately.’17
Her next book would itself continue the work of Orlando and A Room of One’s Own, though it looked very different. In the ‘mystic’, serious, exploratory novel she wrote between 1929 and 1931 she thought again about the many roles played by each individual, and the many people who make each of us what we are. It was the ‘outline of all my friends’ she had started to write earlier and which had been usurped by Vita alone.18 Now she imagined the lives of friends as so interwoven that they ‘continue each other’.