Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

There she is. In these signs. Virginia, so distant from herself, as is each of us, but ever relentless in her attempt to assemble, to feel the scattered mobility, the multiplicity that constitutes her. Worried as well about responding to the “impossible desires to embrace the whole world with the arms of understanding.”¹

And endlessly failing in this, having failed, having admitted that “no, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known,”² having rejected such proof or knowledge and retained the uncertainty of achieving the exactitude beyond the silence that surrounds words, having above all and endlessly repeated her quest: this makes it all the more real, quivering with what she does not know but senses, trembling with what cannot be written down but what she knows how to indicate.

Here she is, passionate, ever watchful for what is always escaping, although she manages to capture its transience; here she is demanding, a little weary, impatient: “Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on & say, ‘This is it’?”³

But can we say of her novels, which are so many live beings, her letters, her personal diaries that reveal her in all her states, sparkling or fragile, that make us convulse with laughter or tremble with emotion, that make us detest her too, can we say, “That’s her”? Thousands of pages overflowing with thrills, gossip, angst, and so rich as well in detailed analysis of her battles with the text, exposing the very core of the science of writing, of being a writer—the very wound, the miracle, the disaster not only of being alive but also of becoming life’s stunned, sensual, greedy, and desperate witness.

Without Virginia knowing it, most of those closest to her, in particular, her father, sister, and especially her husband, differed sharply, and in vital ways, from their reputations—which often still endure. In their own and in others’ eyes, so many equivocations fixed them in roles that were not theirs but that they performed as such, creating serious misunderstandings that Virginia labored under, equivocal as well, deceived by the false appearances that are often still accepted, even confirmed, today.

Some examples? They abound throughout her life, surround her self-inflicted death. The death that Mrs. Dalloway called “an embrace.”⁴ Perhaps the only one possible for Virginia, all the more alone the more she was surrounded.

“How is one to live in such a world!” she exclaims at fifteen, before making Clarissa Dalloway, once again, say how “very, very dangerous” it is “to live even one day.” But she has the answer: to become someone who could write, years later and shortly before her end, “I feel in my fingers the weight of every word.”⁵

And that was the essential thing.

What is the weight of a life?

What we absorb from a work born of the torments and delights experienced by another, thrown naked, raw, into the worst indecency, utterly entangling us: does it compensate for the exploration of loss that sometimes devastated, ravaged as much as intoxicated, that other—in our place and to our profit?

What entangled Virginia?

But, before launching into whole new aspects of her trajectory, one more remark: outside of any religion, Virginia recognized the point at which life itself (a fortiori the life of a human being) cannot be grasped, discerned, much less explained, and how reducing it to narration, to plots, an outline, or worse, conclusions, denies its very being—and how pinning it down to some configuration of conventional reality would destroy the shadow of its passage, its tenuous tie to a conventional reality.

Nevertheless, that is exactly the reality that she summons and interrogates in her novels, that she seizes in its immediacy, as though to better strip away its masks, extract its pulp, watch for its lapses, take it by surprise: the moment of a fleeting apparition of the present captured in its very disappearing.

The world as palimpsest, whose original text poets, painters, musicians, thinkers of all kinds struggle to perceive: it is at the level of appearances that this world subjugates Virginia. From the age of thirteen, with her mother’s death—then in an incestuous climate created primarily by her father, but also with the pattern of early, successive bereavements—yes, from childhood, the landmarks of the habitual, habitable, acknowledged world threatened to elude her, to lead her astray. She quickly perceived other directions, stemming from the loss of all direction, a universe exploding with other possibilities. To return to the everyday, to the commonplace, rational, predictable world, must have seemed as strange, tenuous, and dangerous to her as those chaotic terrains approaching distraction. Coming back to the banal must have seemed more unusual and enigmatic, more charged with magic than the exploding boundaries. And certain coherences more fantastic than chaos. Hence, her fascination for the mysterious effervescence of the moment in its plenitude, its fragility, in that reality, however trivial, briefly fused to the real, that represents, perhaps, dangerously, beauty. That substitutes for the divine: “there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”⁶

Actually, we are it. She was it. She expresses it throughout. But beginning where? Let us go back to the domain of the traditional account (truly, the most impossible), the story of one life lived among other lives, silhouetted against them, and let us find the distortion between what we know of her and what the images of her journey, in all its multiplicity, complications, entanglements, and enigma, seem to reveal.

The first example of such discrepancy? Well, the primary one that focuses on Leonard Woolf, that fascinating, passionate man who nevertheless had to and immediately learned to develop a shell, to construct for himself the persona behind which he hid the rest of his life. Strange, perhaps, this first choice, as Leonard only entered Virginia’s life to marry her. He was thirty-one years old, she was thirty.

However, a quick glance backward to this man’s youth (he was, among other things, an exceptional, if castrated, novelist), and we discover someone wholly other than the man we know, than the man he wanted to be recognized as: a Leonard who uses Virginia to better hide himself and who officially attributes to her his own troubles, his own vertigo in facing the risk of his own alienation. His own hells. If Virginia endlessly seeks her own identity, Leonard, perhaps more painfully, conceals his.

Behind the persona known to be austere, solid, supremely rational, regarded as a pillar—overshadowed by that being of strict reason and moral rectitude, rather cold but ever dynamic in his wisdom—appears another Leonard Woolf, fragile, neurasthenic, deeply despairing after having been mad with hope, and broken. A discouraged, ruined man, as he says, who struggles fiercely but without confidence in the mire of defeat that seems to him inescapable. A man he never ceased to be, who never left him even at the height of success, but whom he considered banished, whom he learned to repress throughout his life, with such vigilance, and such subdued violence as well! And so successfully! In the midst of devastation all around him, unconsciously or rather instinctively wrought.

The most revealing aspect of this biography? Bell’s condescending tone, speaking of his aunt while scotomizing the writer, whose work, as he was fond of admitting coyly, he did not know very well. Instinctive revenge (which we will find often) among Virginia’s survivors, in this case, Vanessa, her sister and beloved rival, who was also Quentin’s mother: to be able finally to dispose of Virginia Woolf, to summon her respectfully, officially discredit her, and disguise it as familiarity; to compare her indulgently, ironically (here good-naturedly) to the supposedly “normal” image she did not present. Separating the writer from the woman to avoid one and disparage the other. Above all, trivializing and ridiculing her alleged lapses with regard to the trivialities from which she stood apart. And thus, inversely, marginalizing her with great authority. In short, putting her back (or rather putting her publicly) in what, it had always been hoped, was her place. And would partly remain so—once Leonard’s fixed ideas, justifications, and conclusions were definitively sanctioned, ratified as legitimate.

So let us meet this forever overshadowed, clandestine Leonard. The one who, at twenty-three, despairs: “O le sale monde! O le sale monde!” Or, as a leitmotif: “The fetid, sordid world!” The one who wonders “why one doesn’t commit suicide, except that one is dead & rotten,” but who is also mad about literature, who asks of Henry James, “Did he invent us or we him?” and who rereads Madame Bovary, “the saddest & most beautiful book I had ever read … One day I shall sit down & read straight on to the end: I don’t think one would ever reach the end, I think one might die with Emma.” The one who believes, hopes, knows himself to be a writer, and whose youth is misspent in exile, a civil servant in the colonies.⁷

A tormented, romantic Leonard, offended socially, close to defeat, resigned and bemoaning the hardships, the impasses, his ruined future. A Leonard whose true reasons, or rather, whose need for marrying Virginia Stephen we will discover.

His childhood? His adolescence? His father, Sydney Woolf, died at forty-nine years old, a successful, prosperous lawyer, his career already among the most brilliant, but as Leonard writes, “we had only recently struggled up … from the stratum of Jewish shopkeepers.”⁸ Leonard, born November 25, 1880, was then twelve years old, with eight brothers and sisters, and a mother who, much impoverished by her widowhood, would descend the social ladder but would manage to enroll her children in the most prestigious English universities. At Cambridge, Leonard spent the most fulfilling years of his life; he fascinated the other students, among them Thoby Stephen, Virginia’s brother. There Woolf was elected “Apostle,” thus becoming part of an envied elite, to which belonged, among others, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and E. M. Forster, as well as his professors, the philosophers Bertrand Russell and George Edward Moore, and later Ludwig Wittgenstein.

He had found his niche. He lost it. And quickly.

His failure: “the crash has come &, by God, it is a crash. It came just an hour ago. I’m 65th!”on the final examination. Without financial resources, his only choice, he said, was to depart for the colonies or become a college usher. “A battered usher of 50, among filthy boys & people with whom he cannot talk, on 150 pounds a year when he wants 15,000? Good God, what a farce, for it might, I feel, so easily be true.”⁹

It would be the colonies. Exile. Permission to return to England for one year out of six: “very yellow & silent—but I should be making 600 pounds a year! … This is a sordid letter, but I feel so.” He is annoyed with himself for having written it, but his addressee, Lytton Strachey, protests: “Oh! No, no, no. Say what you feel at any & every moment. How could I bear anything else?”¹⁰

Soon after, on November 20, 1904, Lytton, whose homosexuality Leonard did not share, writes: “As I watched your ship in the Channel last night, I thought that all was lost. You have vanished and the kisses that I never gave you, and your embraces that I have felt—they are all that remains.”¹¹

Leonard had just embarked, equipped with ninety volumes of Voltaire’s works. Responding to Lytton’s protest would sustain him through six long years of trials: he would pour out his feelings without restraint to his friend in letters that show him tormented, demeaned, shattered in the midst of frantic activity; overwhelmed with work, garnering local successes and promotions, but lost, suffocating outside the circle of his Cambridge friends and struggling, often filled with impotent anger: “You think I shall be in a position to forgive God one day?”¹²

And why not stuck in this trap forever? To Lytton: “I feel that, in a way, you are lost to me already; you at any rate will be here, & there are other people, but I shall be rotting in Ceylon. I shall be out of date after 6 years.” He knew nothing now but regret, longing, nostalgia: “It was always one of our supremacies—our poor dead blighted supremacies—that we could laugh. I think too I can remember them all; how we laughed [at Cambridge] for hours in that dingy old attic of mine & in the Goth’s¹³ green room & Turner’s yellow barn, in your rooms & the cloisters & all over Richmond Park. I haven’t laughed like that since Nov 19th though I was hysterical often on the Syria, & I suppose I shan’t again for 6 years, when I expect I at any rate shall be dried up.” The disorientation persists, the uprootedness, the sensation of a waking nightmare: “You can’t exist, nor grey old Cambridge, nor Bob Trevy nor the Yen. I can’t believe I have ever spoken to you, or rather I shouldn’t if I did not want to so much now.”¹⁴

The idea of a definitive return faded. Foundering, Leonard anticipated a life of constraints, engulfed in a destiny he abhorred. He envisioned himself incapable of ever escaping, suffocated by financial need, lacking qualifications, in a kind of social paralysis that isolated him where he loathed to be: “One thing you must understand & that is that I am done for as regards England. I shall live & die in these appalling countries now. If I come back for good now I should do nothing but loaf until I died of starvation. What else could I do? And as for happiness—I don’t believe in being happy even in England.”¹⁵

Throughout the six years he lived in Ceylon, his letters reflect him actively depressed, overwhelmed with discouragement. Three years before he returned to London on leave, Lytton suggested an escape to him: marry Virginia Stephen. Leonard, who was very close to Thoby Stephen at Cambridge, had only met his two sisters, Virginia and Vanessa, twice, over tea and at a farewell dinner. He immediately latched onto the idea, but not without concluding: “To think of existence at all fills me with horror & sickness; the utter foulness, the stupid blind vindictive foulness of everything & of myself.”¹⁶

This is the man, the man of Ceylon, who, returning to London three years later, would marry Virginia. And this is the man of Ceylon, as we know him, as none (except Lytton) knew him, who would forever claim ignorance regarding all notions of neurosis, neurasthenia, depression or melancholia, any personal thoughts of suicide.

But it is he, the socialist Jew, who in 1940 would propose that he and Virginia, also on Hitler’s blacklist, should asphyxiate themselves if the Nazis landed. And it is he whose suicidal tendencies, melancholia, neurasthenia, and neurosis run as a leitmotif through the letters he wrote from Ceylon, confiding to Lytton: “I sometimes wonder whether I shall commit suicide before the six years are up & I can see you again; at this moment I feel as near as I have ever been. Depression is becoming, I believe, a mania with me, it sweeps upon & over me every eight or ten days, deeper each time. If you hear that I have died of sunstroke, you may be the only person to know that I have chosen that method of annihilation.” And again: “Damn damn damn damn damn I took out my gun the other night, made my will & prepared to shoot myself. God knows why I didn’t; merely I suppose the imbecility of weakness & the futility of ridiculous hopes. Whores & vulgar gramophones, fools & wrecked intellects. Why am I caged & penned & herded with these. I laugh when I read that San Francisco is wiped out & weep over the wreck & ruin of my existence.”¹⁷

Strangely enough, that is where Leonard’s strength resides: in the power of his tragic ardor, as later, in the energy, the endless energy required to keep from expressing it, to hold that ardor in check to ensure his decisive status, never again to find himself an outcast, forever to be respected above all (even if it meant being cowardly sometimes in order to maintain this; even if it meant feigning ignorance of the anti-Semitism to which he was often openly subjected, even among his close friends).

Only his correspondence with Strachey still tied him to the Apostles, to the life that was running its distant course among his friends. Lytton remains passionately faithful to him and finds his letters “Wonderful…. Why are you a man? We are females, nous autres, but your mind is singularly male.”¹⁸

Lytton’s writing is more brilliant, more spirited than Woolf’s. He overflows with dynamism, ambition, humor, and beneath his light dandy-intellectual façade, he reveals a keen capacity for observation and lucid sensitivity toward his friends. A boundless enthusiasm—this was written in 1904, when he was twenty-four years old: “We are greater than our fathers; we are greater than Shelley; we are greater than the Eighteenth Century; we are greater than the Renaissance; we are greater than the Romans and the Greeks. What is hidden from us? We have mastered all. We have abolished religion, we have founded ethics, we have established philosophy, we have sown our strange illuminations in every province of thought, we have conquered art, we have liberated love.”¹⁹ Up until then, they had only good intentions!

Strachey’s only difficulties come precisely from his love affairs, among them his rivalry with Maynard Keynes over the irresistible young painter Duncan Grant, before the latter became the lover of Adrian, the younger brother of Virginia. Who, in their eyes, was only the sister of her other brother, Thoby, so revered at Cambridge. “Oh but the Goth! Don’t you see that if God had to justify the existence of the World it would be done if he could produce the Goth?” exclaims Lytton, who, less than a year after Leonard’s departure, would have tea with “the Gothic at home” and this time would find Virginia “rather wonderful—quite witty, full of things to say, and absolutely out of rapport with reality.”²⁰

Lytton and Leonard had in common their desire to become and knowledge of being writers. Lytton was already imagining readers for their correspondence. And a publisher. Which also explains his flair. But it is Leonard who reveals himself to the fullest, as he is, hyperactive and broken. Devastated. Something died in him then, for good.

Although, if he considered himself a banished, mortified failure in Ceylon, foundering in dereliction, he held sway in the villages there, in the ever increasing regions that fell within his jurisdiction. People bowed down to him. There he dealt with, directed, judged men (natives) destabilized by a triumphant order that was foreign to them, managed by a civilization that was not their own.

Leonard slipped easily into the colonialist role. He was restive only with regard to his own fate, so different from his expectations, falling so far short of his hopes. It is true that the Empire was taken for granted at that time, that colonialism was everywhere accepted, even among those who tended, as he did, toward what would become the British Labour party.

Nearly sixty years later, in his autobiography, he would mention some qualms, a growing uneasiness he felt in Jaffna; a belated awareness of the imperialism that ruled and his own role in it as proconsul. His letters hardly mention it. Nor the reprimands of his superiors, however disinclined they were to condemn their administrators for applying too stringent measures with too zealous rigidity—as they would do themselves.

To be fair—and his first novel, The Village in the Jungle, testifies to this—he was dazzled by the landscape and moved by its inhabitants, whom he preferred to the unthinkable vulgarity of his colleagues. He learned Tamil and Sinhalese. Nonetheless, he was a White Man, civilized, triumphant, brutal: “The Arabs [!] will do anything if you hit them hard enough with a walking stick, an occupation in which I have been engaged for the most part of the last 3 days & nights.”²¹

In each of his posts, he assumed multiple responsibilities: secretary, accountant, administrator, police officer, judge, tax collector, even veterinarian: didn’t he inspect the herds? He inspected … everything everywhere in the ever vaster territories for which he was responsible. He endlessly made the rounds, grand tours in old vehicles, on horseback, on bicycle, grappling with malaria and other diseases; the insects swarmed, the climate was unbearable, his colleagues insipid. The work (an average of sixteen hours a day) became an antidote: “I work, God, how I work. I have reduced it to a method & exalted it to a mania.”²² That would be true, and could be the motto, for his whole life.

One of his responsibilities was to attend hangings; he even had to give the signal for them:

In fact, he adapted and the “appalling spectacle” soon became part of the routine:

My only news is that I had to shoot my dog yesterday & that I had to be present at an execution on Friday. It was really more unpleasant shooting the dog than hanging the man…. The man himself did not care at all. He walked up the scaffold smiling. I heard the priest say to him on the scaffold, when he was waiting with the handkerchief over his face & the noose round his neck, “Are you frightened?” & the man answered in the most casual of tones, “Not a bit.”²⁴

Upon his return, Leonard would be able to exploit these stories of tortures and the role he played in them. From their first meeting, Adrian, Virginia’s younger brother, would remember especially that his “descriptions of hangings were very interesting.”²⁵

“He has ruled India, hung black men, and shot tigers,” Virginia would write her friends a few years later, perhaps to compensate for the announcement (the “confession,” she would call it) of her engagement to “a penniless Jew.”²⁶

Colonialism! It went without saying among the Europeans, particularly the British, in all circles, whatever the political or emotional sensibilities of its protagonists or witnesses. Fundamentally, racism. Unconscious, insofar as it was then considered natural, obvious to the point of going unnoticed, much less judged. And isn’t that still the case? So many present-day forms of reprehensible, even criminal ostracism will be recognized in retrospect.

One more remark: there is no question of idealizing anyone here, much less Virginia. To conceal or temper the known facts would mean sacrificing accuracy, acquiescing to a concern for appeal. It would mean despising Virginia Woolf to present her other than she was in order to preserve her memory.

But one thing is unassailable: her work. A body of work does not require its author to be an ideal or even a decent human being: only a person for whom life is not sufficient as is. It is not incumbent upon this person to offer the reader a gratifying reflection, a model or an example, but, among other things, she must endure her own self and somehow extract something from reality. However sublime, the work of a writer grows from composite, sometimes unpleasant (a euphemism) ground, and does not aim at the sublime, but at the least accessible, most reticent thing: accuracy. And the miracle of its creation often derives from its link with the general turmoil, indeed even its deep roots in failure, decay, or worse….

“Even in the wickedest man there’s a poor innocent horse toiling away, with a heart, a liver, and arteries in which there’s no malice, and which suffer.”²⁷ In the words of Marcel Proust.

But let us return to Leonard, who would rather become a man who no longer suffers, and who would soon put on his impassive, legendary mask.

Return to Leonard and Virginia? To their marriage? We aren’t there yet. And neither is Leonard. Until the time of his engagement, what was his relationship to women, to desire, to sex, to being in love?

Still back in England, he believed Lytton had fallen in love with a woman—but no, he realized, because, with regard to a woman, “you could not be or at any rate would not—with women. I never am either with any individual of the species—yet—except perhaps for a moment with some face or form—only it is more than that—that I see in a carriage or a bus or gutter. But at any rate I know I have the ability if not the inclination.”²⁸ An inclination that would not develop in Ceylon—but rather a growing repulsion, almost a hostility toward women and especially their bodies.

Nevertheless, it was in Ceylon that he experienced his first sexual relations. 1905. He was twenty-five years old. A prostitute, of mixed blood. A night of “degraded debauch…. The ridiculousness of existence never reaches such heights—the elaborate absurdity made me almost impuissant from amusement.” In Ceylon, he would have sexual relations with prostitutes and would experience them with a kind of horror and fascinated guilt, in denial of “these degradations—their lasciviousness or their ugliness.”²⁹

In that narrow colonial environment where everyone watched everyone else, it was difficult, it is true, to maintain a personal life, but Leonard considered all female proximity, no matter how chaste, as sordid. He happened to confide to Lytton that “among other things,” he had fallen in love with a young girl in his circle, whom, as a gentleman, he had to respect (lacking intentions of marriage), thus congratulating himself for acting as though there was nothing between them and deploring what was “none the less unpleasant & filthy. I am beginning to think it is always degraded being in love.” “Degraded” is a term he often pairs with “in love.” In his poems, lovers exchange a “cancerous kiss,” and a woman doesn’t recognize a “dead man’s lips,” unaware that she has kissed a corpse.³⁰

Let us not forget that he would marry Virginia Stephen immediately upon his return to London. It is this lover who would become her partner. The one who in 1907, five years earlier, related how, at the classic invitation from a man (“Would you like a woman?”), he entered a house to find himself face to face with “a half naked woman sitting on a bed. But I was too utterly bored really to feel even the mild disgust which was my only feeling (if there was any). I just sat down on a chair dumb with dejection & finally, without doing or saying anything, gave her all the money I had on me & fled.” It is this lover who declared, three years before marrying Virginia: “Most women naked when alive are extraordinarily ugly, but dead they are repulsive.”³¹

Upon his return to London, did he suddenly fall in love with Virginia, to the point of being transformed into that man so often portrayed as a skilled, duped lover, who would selflessly sacrifice his passion for women, his ardent sexuality, for an utterly inhibited wife?

Hardly! That widely accepted version, whispered discreetly during Virginia’s lifetime (she accepted it), repeated decades later by Leonard in his autobiography, is decidedly false. First of all, their meeting had nothing to do with chance. It was a matter of two trapped beings, each of whom appeared to the other as a last resort.

Virginia, so firmly rooted in the social set that enthralled him, represented the solution for Leonard, who dreamed of leaving Ceylon and reentering, for good this time, the only environment in which he could breathe.

And Leonard, a man of quality, unencumbered, could save Virginia from the dreaded label of “old maid.” “No one has asked me to marry them,” she wrote in 1908, when she was twenty-six years old. Virginia, despite her beauty, was hardly sought-after; without a partner and the status of a married woman, her solitude was a burden to her. A Virginia full of yearning, prey to long, silent grieving due to those wounds of the past that we will soon meet.³²

At thirty years old, Virginia Stephen, who was, in fact, truly supreme, had had two vague, belated proposals, and only one serious one. From Hilton Young, who took quite some time to declare himself and whom, in the end, she turned down. Through the many letters exchanged with her sister, Vanessa, we can follow their anxious, often vain hopes for rendezvous with potential, yet fleeting suitors. “Am I to have no proposal then? If I had had the chance, and determined against it, I could settle to virginity with greater composure than I can, when my womanhood is at question.” Vacationing in Somerset, she worries about Hilton Young: “I have heard nothing from H.Y. [Hilton Young]: and it strikes me that I probably led him to think that I should be here till Saturday week…. I may have been too cold, or too hot, or he may have thought better of it. Anyhow, my chance of a proposal dwindles.” He is the only one (apart from Leonard) to actually declare himself—and she would refuse him.³³

The two other proposals? One from a man already married, Sydney Waterlow; the other from the pusillanimous Walter Lamb, who asked her to wait and could not make up his mind. “Marriage is so difficult. Will you let me wait? Don’t hurry me.” And she: “What am I to do! Am I such a d——d failure. We talked for two hours.”³⁴

Adrian was amused by Virginia’s eagerness to seduce Leonard upon one of his first visits.

It was too funny, after coming in she went up deliberately and changed her costume in spite of the fact that it was pelting with rain put on her best Turkish cloak and satin slippers and so on. Saxon, Woolf and I were kept waiting while she did all this and then we had to take a taxi. She made great eyes at Woolf whom she called markedly Leonard which seems to be a little forward. Her method of wooing is to talk about nothing but fucking and [illegible] which she calls with a great leer copulation and WCs and I dare say she will be successful, I hope so anyway.³⁵

A few weeks before Leonard’s return to England, Virginia seems almost to scream when writing, in the depths of depression: “Did you feel horribly depressed? I did. I could not write, and all the devils came out—hairy black ones. To be 29 and unmarried—to be a failure—childless—insane too, no writer.”³⁶

Yes, they could each provide the other the status they lacked.

Of course they would discover that they had more in common with each other than with most of their circle. They also had Thoby in common, who had recently died at age twenty-five. Thoby, Leonard’s close friend and Virginia’s favorite brother; among her long list of bereavements, her most persistent ghost.

It was Thoby who first mentioned Leonard to Virginia, she would remember, as “a man who trembled perpetually all over [Leonard’s right hand had a permanent tremor, as did his father’s]. He was as eccentric, as remarkable in his way as Bell or Strachey in theirs. He was a Jew. When I asked why he trembled, Thoby somehow made me feel that it was part of his nature—he was so violent, so savage; he so despised the whole human race. ‘And after all,’ said Thoby, ‘it’s a pretty feeble affair, isn’t it?’ Nobody was much good after twenty-five, he said. But most people, I gathered, rather rubbed along, and came to terms with things.” Thoby thought it sublime, Woolf did not: “I was of course inspired with the deepest interest in that violent trembling misanthropic Jew who had already shaken his fist at civilization and was about to disappear into the tropics so that we should none of us ever see him again.”³⁷

Of course Leonard and Virginia would not have married each other if they had not in some way “recognized” each other, and the lukewarm prelude to their marriage did not prevent them from becoming a true couple, based on an enchanting, permanent, potentially fulfilling attachment—undercut by uneasiness, lies (those one tells oneself), and especially, growing contention.

Nothing is ever Manichean, nor often simple. In the smallest fraction of the most tenuous moment, only indistinct, simultaneous, confused elements; whereas composing an account of them, making something of them, requires choices and development. Virginia knew that: to a large extent, it serves as the basis for her work; the moment, which she makes ring like crystal, intercepted as is, unresolved, sprung from, drawn from the real, but issuing from a world at odds with the false compartmentalizations that mask reality.

It was not the facts that were detrimental to Virginia, but the carefully constructed tableau imposed by Leonard. It was his trafficking with immediate memory that led her astray. We can trace it in Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, which recounts his life, beginning with his return from Ceylon, as he told it to himself, his own version, which he needed to achieve the life he chose. He had to forget the humiliated, nearly destroyed young man who already thought of Virginia Stephen as his last hope and, regarding Ceylon, for example, he had to remember only the competent, steady civil servant, too refined for such work, destined to a great and fascinating career in the colonies.

Like the one of Leonard falling suddenly in love with Miss Virginia Stephen and only then deciding to ask for her hand in marriage, which required him to renounce the brilliant colonial future opening before him. “What a career you’re ruining!”³⁸ Virginia would sigh, moved and flattered.

But how can we forget Leonard struggling in Ceylon, suffocating, trapped, mortified, with no way out, and Lytton suggesting that his friend marry Virginia in order to extricate himself, and how can we forget Leonard realizing immediately that it was the “only thing to do”? That was in 1909, three years before the long-awaited leave, which Leonard would convert into a definitive return and his reentry into the only circle compatible to him. It all became possible thanks to his marriage … with Miss Stephen in August 1912.

His response to Strachey three years earlier in Ceylon? Marrying Virginia? “The final solution…. It certainly would be the only thing.” It is as if it were done: Leonard lived perpetually, he said, “on the principle that nothing matters.” He concludes: “I don’t know why the devil I don’t.” All the same, he adds later: “Do you think Virginia would have me? Wire to me if she accepts.”³⁹

Lytton’s perversity: he is the one who proposes to Virginia! She was under the spell of his deep originality, his importance or the importance he audaciously claimed, the charm and mordant intelligence that, without knowing it yet, still too shy, she shared with him, but to her own share she added … all that Lytton lacked. He would long impress her, often as a rival: she was sure (and jealous) of his literary worth and imagined him, mistakenly, destined to magnificent, lasting renown. She would always be pleased and flattered by their exchanges. Above all he was someone very dear to her. In 1924, she would write again, after he had come to dine with her and Leonard: “Oh I was right to be in love with him 12 or 15 years ago. It is an exquisite symphony his nature when all the violins get playing as they did the other night.”⁴⁰

Immediately terrified, horrified by his own move—and the idea that she might kiss him—then, to Lytton’s great confusion, Virginia accepted the proposal. The next morning she retracted it—or was led to do so by her panicking neo-fiancé. She confessed to not loving him, allowing him to make an honorable retreat, as he wrote, still trembling with fear, to his brother James Strachey.

But can’t we imagine his pleasure at promptly informing Leonard, and again urging him to court the woman he didn’t want? Panic-stricken, upset, he claims that she would have been his for the taking, had he been “greater or less…. You would be great enough,” he adds, before turning to the chief cause of his distress: Duncan Grant. Duncan with whom he has just “copulated … again this afternoon, and at the present moment he’s in Cambridge copulating with Keynes.” The letter then turns to Woolf’s poetry. Oh, what trials!⁴¹

Leonard is still suffering in exile:

You cannot imagine the effect of your letters in Hambantota. They make me laugh & cry out loud. To imagine that really Sanger & Bob Trevy & MacCarthy & Virginia exist! I suppose they do in some dim existence move vaguely through life. I suppose everything isn’t jungle & work. But it’s damnably difficult to believe it…. I believe in the reality of you & (the reality of the unreality) of Turner, because if I didn’t I suppose I should cease to believe in my own.⁴²

Such lines make him so endearing (in my eyes, at least) that we mourn the brevity of his career as novelist—only two novels. Never would he confess (and especially not to Virginia) what Lytton alone knew. Never in Leonard Woolf’s life after that time, much less in his autobiography, would there be any sign of the suffering, simultaneously faltering and confident man he had first been.

Yet what a strange suitor he would make!

Lytton persisted: “You must marry Virginia. She’s sitting waiting for you.” He knew, he guessed how much she wanted to be married, which he insinuated and which Leonard understood. A miracle that she existed, so “young, wild, inquisitive, discontented, and longing to be in love,” continued Strachey. The only woman intelligent enough for Leonard. Dangerous to wait, he warned; Woolf risked missing “the opportunity.”⁴³

And Woolf once again acknowledged that “the one thing to do would be to marry Virginia.” What stopped him? “The horrible preliminary complications, the ghastly complications too of virginity & marriage altogether appall me.”⁴⁴

How not to think here of the reputation for frigidity that would haunt Virginia Woolf, and of the sexual prowess, expert and sacrificed, that would be credited to Leonard?

I remember my first meeting with Quentin Bell in 1973. He was participating, with his delicious English accent, in a series of radio programs I was producing on—guess who! In person the most exquisite and jovial of men, Quentin spoke with kind indulgence about his aunt, whose importance he considered to derive primarily from her relationship to Clive and Vanessa Bell, his parents. Vanessa possessed the wisdom, good sense, and social integration that her sister lacked (as we shall see later). And in 1973, little or nothing was known of Virginia herself, of her life, of those close to her, except what her nephew wrote about her, with great charm and liveliness, but with even greater unintentional bad faith, for he was writing atavistically, out of his fidelity to the family tradition. His biography of Virginia Woolf had just appeared in French.

I remarked: “You show her to be a very complete, very intellectual woman, who loved life in all its forms.” At which point he immediately interrupted: “From the perspective of sexual life, one cannot call her a complete woman. She was cold. She was not normal from this perspective. In other relationships, yes, she was normal.”⁴⁵

“Not normal!” That was exactly the label Virginia dreaded and bore; Bell’s account testifies above all to her circle’s more or less implicit rejection of Virginia as she was: the brilliant, famous Virginia Woolf, often arrogant, even fierce, irresistibly funny, as well as the uncertain one, so vulnerable to suffering, to the horrors that often assailed her. Of Virginia the writer, accessible only in her work, who, in order to accomplish it, had to draw on her torments and to renounce the defenses that would have allowed her to avoid them, but only by forfeiting her direct access, harsh as it was, to what she desired.

Virginia Woolf, invincible and disarmed.

In 1973, Quentin Bell’s word was law, yet I had to ask him if that “abnormality” hadn’t sparked in Virginia her sense of nature, of life, and influenced her writing? Above all, hadn’t she experienced her own sexual “normality,” which was not restricted to the sexual organs, neither to condoned patterns of sexuality nor to those considered forbidden? With which she was familiar?

Appalled, Quentin let out a pained, indignant protest: “That coldness!”⁴⁶ Before sighing, conciliatory but no less reproving, and saying that she “saw the world in a very unusual way.” He then recounted the lovely remark made by Clive, his father: “For the rest of us, life’s great business is the adventure of love. For her, it is when a butterfly comes through the window.” And that was true. As well.

Dear Quentin! He did not even need to say the word to make it heard: “frigid,” and frigid, Virginia disappeared into the ridiculous. Invalidated. She became a writer, but was deprived of the right to speak of sexuality. She could write novels brimming with sensuality, not a word lacking sexual potential? No matter. Hers is an alternative view of the libido’s distribution? She’s an outlaw. She doesn’t adopt or conform to the common cliché? She’s cold. She derives pleasure directly from her writing? You could say she’s dreaming, she’s sublimating. She expresses negation, frustration? Well, you can see that! She’s not a real woman—since she does not embody a disembodied woman.

“That coldness!” groans her nephew regarding a woman whose every sense was perpetually on alert and who lived forever permeable to the world—which was a living organism for her, entirely erotic, in which she participated, eagerly, attuned to and awaiting all its pulsations.

The wild sexuality that runs through her work, that cannot be reduced to one conventional act and never focuses on a bed, can be disturbing and even terrifying, but especially can take us aback. Lytton reproached Virginia for including not a single scene of coitus. Indeed. But did Strachey believe he could thus defuse the subversive sexuality that underlies these pages, so diffuse that it is indistinguishable from the text? “I’m sure I live more gallons to the minute walking once round the square than all the stockbrokers in London caught in the act of copulation.”⁴⁷

Sensual, yes, the work of Virginia Woolf, but sexual as well, in the sense that the tension, potentiality, and genius of sexual pleasure and its orgasms are everywhere invoked, coveted, attained. Suggested in various ways. Physical as well is the need to induce the writing to become a corporeal, connected, joined being, capable of experiencing and inciting rapture. The orgasm.

Or rather, they do not take place at all and desire prevails, unresolved, maintained in abeyance—in the state of desire. “The old horror come back—to want and want and not to have.”⁴⁸

In To the Lighthouse, it’s the living presence of Mrs. Ramsay, dead for years, that Lily Briscoe desires in vain, straining against the intractable and, like Virginia after so many early losses, confronting this loathed finality against which she is endlessly shattered. “To want and not to have—to want and want—how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again.”⁴⁹

But what Virginia desired was something else too, something else that she still lacked desperately in 1923, four years before the publication of To the Lighthouse, when she wrote in her diary: “And as usual I want—I want—But what do I want? Whatever I had, I should always say I want, I want.” But what? The impossible, of course, the dead coming back to life; the work under way finished, of course, and the next one already …, and then, and then…. But also, and perhaps above all, the carnal closeness, denied her, of other desiring bodies, mutually enacting, fulfilling those desires—in a word, coitus, Lytton Strachey would mock. Yes, but not only that. But that as well. Perhaps above all, an embrace that would not be death’s, but equivalent to the power of death, which Mrs. Dalloway also thought was “an attempt to communicate.”⁵⁰

Yes, because ironically, in everyday life, even in the narrow sense that her nephew understood it, it does not seem that Virginia was so hostile to the everyday forms of sexuality. Unlike Leonard. Of the two, he is the one who finds sex repulsive, she the one who safeguards him from it.

Evidence shows that sexual rejection was not Virginia’s doing, but her partners’—Leonard and also Vita Sackville-West—given their equivocations, their frightened retreats not from the “coldness” Quentin Bell names, but rather from her fervor, her anticipation. Her “excitement,” as Leonard says. “Ça lui dit trop,” worries Vita.⁵¹

Unwitting testimony from Woolf, who hopes, on the contrary, to demonstrate the stubborn unresponsiveness of his companion: he confides in Gerald Brenan, a writer friend of Lytton, in March 1923, the very year when Virginia wrote: “I want—I want. But what do I want?” The Woolfs, on vacation, stopped to see him in the small Spanish mountain village where he lived, and Brenan remembers: “Leonard told me that when on their honeymoon he had tried to make love to her she had got into such a violent state of excitement that he had to stop, knowing as he did that these states were a prelude to her attacks of madness. This madness was of course hereditary…. So Leonard, though I should say a strongly sexed man, had to give up all idea of ever having any sort of sexual satisfaction. He told me that he was ready to do this ‘because she was a genius.’”⁵²

Brenan hears it before Bell.

As far as genius goes, Leonard was one too, for turning situations to his own advantage, as here, for acquiring over Virginia an influence that he would let be known within his circle, so that each of its members would subsequently attest to it. He provided an intimate portrait of Virginia Woolf, which he created, he believed, in the liberated Bloomsbury style, as we will see. Quite a dirty move, actually, revealing one of the ways he will use Virginia’s alleged (“of course hereditary”) “madness.” Throughout their marriage, Virginia would have to adapt to the version of her own life continuously invented by Leonard, in real time. Just as she would have to submit to the consequences he inferred from it, sometimes very serious ones—in particular, being deprived of children.

Most importantly, it is not a cold, passive woman, nor one adverse to sexual pleasure, that we discover in the confidences shared with Brenan. He does not call her disinterested, repulsed, but “excited”—in what sense? That of a potential lover, expectant, responsive, easily aroused?

A disaster for Leonard!

And he does not persist, fears her eagerness, hopes against hope for the opposite reaction. He is more terror-stricken than she is by how “ghastly” the undoubtedly clumsy “preliminary complications” might be. She is not the one he wants to protect by interrupting the act; it is he who withdraws and flees, terrified.⁵³

He does not speak to Brenan of Virginia’s frigid behavior, but on the contrary, of an “excitement,”⁵⁴ which could mean that she resisted (not necessarily irrevocably, of course), but also that she responded to this lover, hopeless as he might be, that she expected him, endowed with some capacity for that pleasure which he would rather consider harmful to a wife he termed mentally ill, continually threatened by madness.

Now, at the time of their honeymoon, he could not have “known” of a single “state of excitement” signifying “a prelude” to what he calls “her attacks of madness.” He hardly knew her, they had not lived together, he had almost no experience of her—he would often insinuate that he was not adequately warned about his fiancée’s fragility. He had yet to imagine the rituals he would later perform, constantly watching over his wife with ostentatious discretion, playing a role generally perceived as that of protective, dominant guardian—interrupting her in public when she spoke with too much passion, according to him, limiting her engagements, managing her time to avoid all forms of “excitement.” Excitement that he would decide, once and for all, provoked the attacks from which he would protect her. So many conspicuous arrangements would persuade their circle, would convince Virginia herself, of her state of suspended madness, forestalled by the devotions of a providential benefactor.⁵⁵

Virginia’s fragility was obvious, but what made her more fragile, what endangered her, was the continuous, surreptitiously spectacular fuss made over her throughout her life, even though, beginning in 1916 and over the course of her remaining twenty-five years, she experienced not a single real attack. Perhaps (although nothing is so simple) in part thanks to Leonard and his fanatical precautions!

Leonard’s constant vigilance would serve as a screen for his own troubles, allow him to project them onto a woman and tend in her what worried him about himself, what he feared, repressed, tried desperately to forget through the strict protocols and routines necessary to the obsessive personality he was. Like the daily glass of milk that he brought her and made her drink—in short, suckling the woman whom he would deny children. In fact, he distracted himself from his own neurasthenia, from his existential anxiety, evading them by transferring them symbolically to a skittish Virginia, whom he would nurse for life. “I begin to despair of finishing a book on this method—I write one sentence—the clock strikes—Leonard appears with a glass of milk.”⁵⁶ A glass also emblematic of his influence over her.

What he describes to Brenan is his own neurosis, his phobia, his terror—among others—of degradation, his dread of the “horrible preliminary complications” and, just as “ghastly … of virginity and marriage,” provoked by a honeymoon, the very idea of which repulsed him in Hambatota. Caught in that situation, he is the one who feels threatened and who blocks, interrupts, “stops” what viscerally alarms him.⁵⁷

For Virginia, that part of life was done for. Maybe she had hoped that Leonard could show her the way to it; what was forbidden her had to be turned into another loss.

Thanks to Leonard, it was decided that she was frigid toward men and the sexual act, under the pretext that her experience—if it could be called that—with her husband had not delighted her. The opposite would have been rather surprising! It is easy to imagine the immense disappointment of her honeymoon, such a failed, curtailed initiation, for which she would accept sole responsibility.

But upon returning, to a woman friend: “Why do you think people make such a fuss about marriage and copulation? … I find the climax immensely exaggerated,” before adding: “I might still be Miss S … ,” and “Don’t marry till you’re 30—if then.”⁵⁸

Writing to Lytton, casualness and crude expressions were due. From a letter written during the honeymoon, this most romantic account—we are in Venice: “The W.C. opposite our room has not been emptied for 3 days, and you can there distinguish the droppings of Christian, Jew, Latin and Saxon—you can imagine the rest.” But there is a certain (resigned) bitterness between the lines:

There remains the loss of a love life more or less consciously awaited for a long time, thus refused her, out of reach. “To want and want and not to have.”⁶⁰

And the legacy of this fiasco: the role of the wife promptly pronounced “frigid.” Never did the illusory masculine archetype or Leonard himself come into question. The lover’s prowess went without saying? Like Brenan and the Bells, didn’t everyone perceive Leonard (he saw to this) as “strongly sexed”? No one was privy to what we now know about him at the time of his marriage, through his letters to Strachey, except the cynical Lytton.

And so, “masculine frigidity, reluctance”? You must be joking! A heterosexual male’s aversion to the female body? You must be delirious! Leonard, the couple’s male principle, obviously embodied the “norm.” Virginia herself didn’t deny it. From which arose a sense of deficiency regarding her own body, of indebtedness to her husband. But also a feeling of doubt, perhaps, and resentment over what went supremely unspoken, for no doubt she was aware (more or less consciously!) of what that was. What had determined for her—reflected in her—his justified withdrawal.

Virginia was never clear herself on those grounds, but it seems certain that Leonard led her into sexual failure, which he made almost public and attributed to her, and which was his doing. And which would not have had such significance if Leonard had not sacrificed his wife in order to exonerate himself and even derive benefits, boasting of his victimization, playing the hero. If he had not thrown his wife’s reputation to the Brenans and the Quentin Bells, thus allowing them to discuss Virginia Woolf’s sexuality and to conclude that she was “abnormal.”

Their failure might have strengthened their bond, henceforth founded on less fragile relations, but not without favoring a certain domination on Leonard’s part, not without justifying his tacit demands, not without nurturing and solidifying the image of a wife so far outside the norm as to be “abnormal.” And not without giving the husband power over his deficient wife.

With Leonard, Virginia can act in concert, with him she can gather flowers—but give them, receive them?

And of whom is she thinking when Septimus Smith, in Mrs. Dalloway, attributes his own feelings to Shakespeare? “Love between man and woman was repulsive to Shakespeare. The business of copulation was filth to him.” Or: “How Shakespeare loathed humanity—the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly!”⁶²

Virginia’s reputation prompted Vita’s boasting, flattered as she was by such a conquest, even as she reassured Harold. Like Vita, he was under the influence of the legend, started by Leonard, accepted by Virginia, according to which the latter was frigid and would be mad were it not for her husband’s vigilance. Vita remarked in her a “funny mixture of hardness and softness—the hardness of her mind, and her terror of going mad again.”⁶³

A radiant Virginia, believing she was experiencing the natural sensuality of a shared passion, did not stand a chance. Vita declares to Harold,

I am scared to death of arousing physical feelings in her, because of the madness. I don’t know what effect it would have, you see; and that is a fire with which I have no wish to play. No, thank you. I have too much real affection and respect. Also she has never lived with anyone but Leonard, which was a terrible failure, and was abandoned quite soon…. Besides ça ne me dit rien; and ça lui dit trop, where I am concerned…. So you see I am sagacious—though probably I would be less sagacious if I were more tempted…. I have gone to bed with her (twice), but that’s all; and I told you that before, I think.⁶⁴

Virginia frigid? No, dangerous: “Ça lui dit trop.” Once again, she is too “excited.”

Harold was reassured, which was the aim of Vita’s letter, at least part bluff; it ends there. Of course he considered Virginia “beneficial” for his wife (as well as for her literary reputation). Nevertheless he warned: “I do hope that Virginia is not going to be a muddle. It is like smoking over a petrol tank.” Then, recovering his composure: “It’s a relief to feel that you realize the danger and will be wise. You see, it’s not merely playing with fire; it’s playing with gelignite.”⁶⁵

The game is up. Virginia is judged. A perpetual candidate for madness. Inaccessible. Taboo. Kindness means that she be spared what she desires—what she wants and wants and cannot have, “protected” from all bliss of that order, from all supposedly harmful excitement—but according to what decision, what decrees, if not the scenario concocted (in all sincerity, he believed) by Leonard? No one thought at the time—or since, really—of the contradiction between a woman judged as simultaneously frigid and too “excited.” Both grounds for rejecting her.

It was not her lover’s coldness that fazed Vita Sackville-West, but her seemingly excessive ardor, her desire, no doubt heightened by her long-standing frustration and her frantic hope. Virginia tries to reassure Vita: “Please come, and bathe me in serenity again. Yes, I was wholly and entirely happy. If you could have uncored me—you would have seen every nerve running fire—intense, but calm.”⁶⁶

Vita, as seen by Virginia: in her eyes, all pearls and cashmere, castles and prestigious ancestors. Vita, in love with her for a time, but forever fickle, only briefly the physical lover of the long-awaiting Virginia: “Remember Virginia. Forget everybody else. Should you say, if I rang you up to ask, that you were fond of me? If I saw you would you kiss me? If I were in bed would you—…”⁶⁷

Awaiting, often in despair: “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,” she wrote to Vita. To Lytton she wrote: “I do feel that love is such a horror I would advise anyone to break off.”⁶⁸

Virginia: then incandescent, singularly passionate. Anything but frigid. Rejected, “interrupted” here as she had been by Leonard.

As for him, surely the most awkward of lovers, reluctant, incapable of engaging his partner except in his own denial—perhaps the hint of passion, even of sudden wonder, might let him successfully shift their relationship to another register? But if we search her husband’s autobiography for signs of Virginia, he seems immune to any such enchantment.

Let us watch her surface in these pages and memories, their author’s life, let us watch for signs of emotion. He has returned to London, on leave from Ceylon. The trouble is … she does not come up. Leonard mentions other thrills, as the young poet Rupert Brooke appears to an enthralled Woolf, passing through Cambridge: “When I first saw him, I thought to myself: ‘That is exactly what Adonis must have looked like in the eyes of Aphrodite’ … the red-gold of his hair and the brilliant complexion. It was the sexual dream face not only for every goddess, but for every sea-girl wreathed with seaweed red and brown and, alas, for all the damp souls of housemaids.”⁶⁹

Let us turn the pages. Virginia? Still no sign of her. Then here comes one by way of her sister: “Vanessa was, I believe, usually more beautiful than Virginia.” This belated, inferior Virginia, whose sole function is to be compared to her sister, who outshines her since

the form of her features was more perfect, her eyes bigger and better, her complexion more glowing. If Rupert was a goddess’s Adonis, Vanessa in her thirties had something of the physical splendour which Adonis must have seen when the goddess suddenly stood before him. To many people she appeared frightening and formidable, for she was blended of three goddesses with slightly more of Athene and Artemis in her and her face than of Aphrodite.

As for her voice: the most beautiful ever heard. Ah, and her tranquility! Which did not at all detract from her depth, because in addition to extreme sensitivity, there reigned in her “a nervous tension,” indicating “some resemblance to the mental instability of Virginia.”⁷⁰

The first glimpses of Virginia, recollected: less beautiful than her sister and mentally unstable.

Let us read on. Here is Woolf, overcome with admiration. For Virginia this time? No: for Thoby, who so embodied his nickname, the Goth. And whom Vanessa embodied in turn … his female double. Six years earlier in Ceylon, when Lytton announced that Vanessa, Thoby’s double, was going to marry Clive Bell, Leonard acknowledged his bewilderment:

But what about Virginia, so rarely and belatedly encountered in these pages? Ah, there she is! And, at last, defined: “a very different kind of person beneath the strong family resemblances in the two sisters.” But Virginia? Virginia herself? Well: “She was, as I said, normally less beautiful than Vanessa.” Nonetheless, Leonard continues, “when she was well, unworried, happy, amused, and excited, her face lit up with an intense almost ethereal beauty,” and also “when, unexcited and unworried, she sat reading or thinking.” Otherwise, tension, disease, or anxiety did not erase her beauty but rendered it “painful.”⁷²

All the more so because Virginia was, alas, a genius, the only one Leonard acknowledged knowing personally. A genius. Is that even reasonable? And what can be done about it? “One has to call it genius because the mental process seems to be fundamentally different from those of ordinary or normal people and indeed from the normal mental processes of these abnormal persons.”⁷³ A bit convoluted, even vague, but how disturbing! Though it’s reassuring finally to encounter here the “true” Virginia Woolf: Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf.

After such an enthusiastic description, Leonard immediately moves on to the essential thing: poor Virginia makes passersby laugh. She seems “strange to the ‘ordinary’ person.” The word “ridiculous” appears three times in two pages, and the word “laughter” repeatedly: people “would go into fits of laughter at the sight of Virginia.” They “stop and stare” and “giggle” and “roar with laughter.”⁷⁴

And note especially that, to their eyes, Virginia represents: “some monstrous female caricature.”⁷⁵ According to Leonard. This is not innocuous. What he claims here is what he himself imagines; what he claims to interpret and convey are his own assumptions, originating with him.

These are Leonard’s spontaneous memories of the past; this is how Virginia appears in the book that is his witness.

Now, among any of their contemporaries who mention her, no such portrait emerges, nothing even close; and Virginia, who records daily whatever assails her, troubles or joys, does not mention a single incident (much less recurrent ones) of hysterical passersby; on the contrary, she is continually delighted by her happiness, even her intoxication, wandering the streets of London, walking there for hours. “London is enchanting. I step out upon a tawny coloured magic carpet, it seems, & get carried into beauty without raising a finger…. One of these days I will write about London, & how it takes up the private life & carries it on, without any effort. Faces passing lift up my mind.”⁷⁶ Her photographs testify to her beauty, which increased, and did, in fact, vary with her moods. Her contemporaries bear witness to …

No! That’s not the question, no need for such testimonials. Why does Leonard’s judgment even matter?

The real question concerns his choices, his priorities, his selective memory; the dryness of his account when it involves Virginia, in contrast to his relative enthusiasm for his other subjects; it concerns the discrepancy between the tone of these pages and Virginia’s, the unkindness, intentional or not, in these first references and the mute, unconscious aggressiveness that seems to lie beneath them.

The question? It concerns this almost hallucinatory entry, this initial, so naturally antagonistic approach; it lies in the order, the strange sequence of incongruous memories; the minor place Leonard gives the woman whom, he will announce tersely a few pages later, he has fallen “in love with”⁷⁷; in the grotesque situations attributed to her, in the lack of tenderness, or even sympathy or respect, for her. Rather a kind of revenge, it seems to be an instinctive confession. The expression of a long buried, undeclared contention finally acknowledged. And nothing of all that struck the author in rereading the text, a familiar exercise for the great editor that, among other things, Leonard Woolf had become (as had Virginia).

Such an introduction to his wife, such a preface to his account of their life together, is, at the very least, surprising. Doesn’t Leonard’s memory include a single image of Virginia that would place her in the company of those idols he so admired, like Thoby, Rupert, or Vanessa, kindred spirits in heart and mind?

And what to think of certain unexpected leaps? For example, from the paragraph that ends with Virginia’s death: “On March 28 she drowned herself in the Ouse,” to the following one that begins with: “I must return to the subject of our income.” And what to think of the single (written) memory of their honeymoon (in which she does not appear): being hungry on a boat carrying them from Spain to Marseilles. They had practically not eaten because of their travel schedule, so: “At 7:30 in the morning I staggered up on to the deck and found the Third Officer who spoke English. I explained to him that I was very hungry and why. He took me up on to the bridge and had breakfast sent to me there; the first course was an enormous gherkin swimming in oil and vinegar. One of the bravest things I have ever done, I think, was to eat this, followed by two fried eggs and bacon, coffee and rolls, with the boat, the sea, and the coast of France going up and down all round me.” Then there are three lines about Venice, but only about the weather, describing the wind: “whistling through its canals, [the wind on the Grand Canal] can sometimes seem the coldest wind in Europe. And at the end of November we returned to London.”⁷⁸

Strange glimpses, strange memories—especially strange in their selection, the priority certain ones are given. Are they still stamped with the impressions of the Leonard Woolf who still did not like women and chafed against the future destined to him in India, from which only Virginia Stephen could save him? Dependent as he had been on her, on her decision to marry him, on the stability and status she provided him … was he ever able to forgive her for it? And between them we will encounter so many other points of contention, even within their deep affinities.

Strange, yes, strange entrances for the actors in this retrospective. Apocryphal recapitulation of his own life by the Leonard we have known as young, foundering, volcanic, at bay, cursing fate, suffering … this Leonard who will subsequently be banished. Absent from an autobiography devoted to illustrating an existence entirely balanced, satisfied, scholarly, and centered, never mentioning the tormented, impervious, furious, terrified man that Leonard long continued (or never ceased) to be, whom he hides here again, or has learned to forget.

Ongoing oscillations…. Throughout his memoir Leonard furiously erases the place held in his life by what he wants forgotten; his systematic omissions are all that can protect him. Resulting in the version that verifies, through so much exorcism, the deceptions he rehearsed following his return from Ceylon.

What survives in these pages is a path of serene wisdom, certitude, and amnesia, traced to the detriment of the man Leonard had once hoped to become, whose life he would surely have been able to assume, inhabit, lead to the end, but who was evicted: that young man exiled from Cambridge, vibrant with despair, developing through hardships the nervous tissue of a poet, that is to say, the true writer he could have been and whom he had kept mute for decades in the body of this octogenarian who was now recounting his life without revealing it.

And in comparison to Leonard’s landmarks … the sudden desire, the need to encounter here something precise and tangible, listening to Virginia Woolf not as she appears fixed in her husband’s discourse, but as the Virginia who contemplates time and summarizes what is in question, what really does and does not happen, thus: “One incident—say the fall of a flower—might contain it. My theory being that the actual event practically does not exist—nor time either.”⁷⁹

Which serves as one example of what Leonard lost along the way: the right to hope to create, beginning from what he alone could say, beginning from what he alone had achieved, apart from the rest. He is left with the ability to listen, to follow, and to publish the kinds of works he would no longer write. And, as a writer, to produce many other kinds of works, essays, political pamphlets, in which he could avoid anything personal. Only Virginia remained free to risk the ordeal of endless self-searching, while he would flee from himself, behind his impassive mask. But did he flee or was he chased?

For he had spoken. Written. Confessed. Risked. He had spelled out his truth, confided it, conveyed it, precisely, in all its convolutions, in all its subtlety, with the simplicity of exactitude. That was after his return from Ceylon, at the very beginning of his marriage, in his second novel, The Wise Virgins.⁸⁰ Note the initials of the title: reversed, they are Virginia’s.

Guilelessly, he had laid out what he would never speak of again. His fury and unease, the anguished spirit, the calm, lucid derision, the indecision, the bittersweet renunciations, the youthful rage, the ultimate numbness of the young Harry Davis, Leonard’s double. Which would unleash in his circle, cruelly exposed, such rancor, even such suffering as only the utter failure of the work could make them forget.

The book could only founder. It was to be drowned immediately in silence, rejection, denial, shock: it was to be killed even before the battle. Its publication in 1914 altered nothing. It was ignored. Death by nonreception. Permanent leave. The novel, which naïvely exposed what went unsaid and innocently addressed taboos, had committed suicide. Unwittingly, unintentionally subversive, sincere, Leonard, at his own risk, had given himself away. Unsuspecting, through Harry Davis, he had proclaimed his unresolved differences, his otherness. His weakness. He had shown himself vulnerable.

From Lytton, even from Lytton, he had concealed those wounds. It was understood between them that they could discuss anything without scrutinizing it. The casual tone of Cambridge and the Apostles, which Bloomsbury would inherit, elegant and supple, cynical when need be, would sweep him along. When Strachey described to him a successful playwright, a Jew, whom he had met among Bertrand Russell’s friends, as “utterly vulgar with the sort of placid, easy-going vulgarity of your race,” and was outraged by “how many thousands roll into Sutro’s circumcised pocket per year,” Leonard had answered from Jaffna: “Your Jewish parties with Mrs Russell are nothing to my perpetual existence here.” But The Wise Virgins exposes his distress at such insults and injuries, suppressed, as here, in complicit silence.⁸¹

In this book, he betrays this silence that authorized the habit of insult, anti-Semitic cracks taken for granted. He reveals a presence, his own, constant and conscious. Suffering and targeted. He imprudently reveals himself as vulnerable, fragile, vehement. For the last time.

With the work soon forgotten, his circle could speak in his presence once again and yet remain “among themselves.” In 1930, Harold Nicolson, a diplomat, would nevertheless express doubts; in his personal diary, regarding a meeting on the social qualifications necessary for entering the Foreign Office: “The awkward question of the Jews arises. I admit that is the snag. Jews are far more interested in international life than Englishmen, and if we opened the service it might be flooded by clever Jews. It was a little difficult to argue this point with Leonard there.”⁸²

Had he read this private document, would Leonard have reacted, defended his obvious right to exist, the same as Nicolson’s, as an Englishman? It seems unlikely. Henceforth, he would remain impassive toward what perpetually hung in the air, apparently benign. Woolf, the leftist, the influential Labor Party figure, would overlook the political content of such discrimination, all the more perverse for being unconscious. When Virginia announced to friends at dinner that “the Jew”⁸³ would answer their questions, he protested mildly that he’d speak only if properly addressed. That was the height of his rashness; no fear of him causing any scandal. But in his professional and private life, his authority prevailed. Respect, great esteem, even admiration surrounded him until the end. A reasonable trade-off?

This much he had understood: nothing more would be heard from him of his inner life, that very exile from which the impulse to write and to confide derives. Any record of rejection, of his own enigma, of his singularity would be banished before having been considered. Scotomization. Woolf would never again be that writer; he would forgo awareness of his isolation and focus on remedying it, and in order to do so, keep quiet about it. No more states of the soul, reports, confidences; nothing of his truth, his desires, or lack of them.

He would no longer approach that which was intimate, since his unconventional sexuality would be taken as utmost indecency, an aggressive obscenity, not even to be considered. Above all, in order to retain his place among those he had chosen (which would partly form, around him and his wife, the Bloomsbury group), he would pretend to ignore that exotic status they would secretly grant him. To make them forget it, he would seem to stand with them, taciturn, when Jewish specificities (usually derogatory) were discussed.

He kept quiet. Virginia spoke.

“Then the curtain rose. They spoke.”⁸⁴ Isa and Giles, at the end of Between the Acts.

But Leonard and Virginia?

Countless exchanges between them. Endless affinities. Unshakeable foundations. But what did not have a place, what separated them, what they did not mention, weighed more heavily still—too heavily.

The curtain had not risen.

“In the beginning,” writes Leonard Woolf in 1913 or 1914, on the very first page of his second and final novel, “he and she lived in a cave … or they burrowed holes in the earth.” Huts and caves will become houses where we discover the man “jealous for the woman who has come to him, despite the clergy man and the gold ring, as she came to the cave, to be possessed by him and to possess him and to bear him children in the large brass bed.”⁸⁵

“Before they slept, they must fight; after they fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born,” writes Virginia in Between the Acts, in 1941, in the last line of the last paragraph of the last book that she would ever write. “The house had lost its shelter. It was the night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among rocks. Then the curtain rose. They spoke.”⁸⁶

Let us leave them together.

She, often in love with their life, enchanted by their marriage, by its song and its security. “‘Are you in your stall, brother?’” is how she describes their coexistence, and she delights in their divine solitude one day in October 1938, at Rodmell, their country house where they so often stayed:

He, more secret, stubborn, having achieved his goal, faithful and constant, eminent, clinging fast to the prudent stability he has finally won. And she, transfixed with happiness when one day he declares her to be the most beautiful of women or slips into her bed one anniversary morning (they don’t sleep together) to give her a green handbag and sweets, or if they enjoy taking off to Brighton for the afternoon to buy those chocolates they adore and all the newspapers before he takes her to a movie and then to a tea room. And especially if he admits his helplessness at the idea of being separated from her, even for a few days, and she decides not to leave for Paris: “You see it is enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife.”⁸⁸

But let us go back to their beginning, years earlier in London, when Leonard returned on leave from Ceylon in May 1911. He was constantly afraid. Afraid of asking Virginia Stephen for her hand, and even more afraid of not winning it and having to return to Ceylon. The year’s leave was coming to an end.

In November, he wrote to Lytton this last item in their exchange:

I saw Virginia yesterday. They have taken Brunswick Sq. [Virginia and her younger brother Adrian]. I am going to see it tomorrow as they can give me rooms there. I shall decide then. I see it will be the beginning of hopelessness. To be in love with her—isn’t that a danger? Isn’t it always a danger which is never really worth the risk? That at any rate you of all can tell me. I expect after two weeks I shall again take the train not to Morocco but to Ceylon. It is something to feel that it is always waiting there for one at Victoria.⁸⁹

Virginia, with her sister’s support, seems to have considered and greeted Leonard as a potential and welcome suitor. It was Vanessa who first invited the young man to dinner; it was Virginia who then invited him to the country, and who suggested that he take rooms in the residence she shared with Adrian, who was by then Duncan Grant’s lover. Duncan, also a boarder, as was Maynard Keynes.

Leonard moved in that fall. Since his arrival in London six months earlier, he had hardly encountered her, but those months he would remember as the happiest of his life. He would marvel at having led then an existence of “pure, often acute pleasure,” as he had never known before or after, in this rediscovered England, reunited with his friends. The six most beautiful months of his life came to an end as 1911 ended, and it was then, in January 1912 (the enchanted months forever over), that he fell “in love with Virginia” and asked for her hand in marriage. They were wed that summer.⁹⁰

She hesitated, in enough distress to warrant a rest cure. “I only ask for someone to make me vehement, and then I’ll marry them!” Leonard did not make her vehement. She does not hide it from him, says she is vexed by “the strength of your desire. Possibly, your being a Jew comes in also at this point. You seem so foreign….” She asks him to wait and warns him: “Again, I want everything—love, children, adventure, intimacy, work…. I sometimes think that if I married you, I could have everything—and then—is it the sexual side of it that comes between us? 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.” Perhaps, without knowing it, she thus reassured him, seemed to offer what he hoped for—or feared—something less degrading? But most importantly, she admits to her surprise sometimes at “being half in love with you, and wanting you to be with me always, and know everything about me.”⁹¹

Woolf makes his wager, resigns his post. Waits.

And Virginia accepts him.

Then the series of letters from Virginia on the topic announcing, as to Violet Dickinson: “I’ve got a confession to make. I’m going to marry Leonard Wolf [sic]. He’s a penniless Jew.”⁹² A penniless Jew who is giving up a great career for her.

To Lytton, a card: “Ha! Ha!”⁹³ signed by the engaged couple.

Eighteen years later, she would confide in a new friend, Ethel Smyth, a composer and conductor, eccentric, elderly, in love with her and perhaps her only true confidante: “How I hated marrying a Jew—how I hated their nasal voices, and their oriental jewellery, and their noses and their wattles—what a snob I was.” She reproaches herself for it … but not excessively! She admits that Jews of course have an “immense vitality, and I think I like that quality best of all,” but, valued or scorned, they were for her, before all else, “Jews,” defined by their ethnicity. In that same letter: “They cant die—they exist on a handful of rice and a thimble of water—their flesh dries on their bones but still they pullulate, copulate, and amass … millions of money.” That certainly had not been the case for poor Mrs. Woolf or for her children.⁹⁴

Virginia is unrelenting. “I do not like the Jewish voice, I do not like the Jewish laugh,”⁹⁵ she writes in her diary three years after her marriage, regarding her sister-in-law Flora. To the point that her visceral hatred leads to hysteria, nervous attacks, and delirium, brought on by her frantic, almost superstitious physiological horror, gone entirely unexamined?

Leonard? For her, he was an exceptional Jew, hardly labeled, hardly exotic. Labeled all the same by his circle, in that refined environment famous for its progressive ideas, its open-mindedness and free morals. Intellectuals who would be horrified by Hitler’s rise, and wouldn’t realize the extent to which they and their kind throughout the world had cleared the way for him.

Harry Davis, provocative and wild, beside himself, at the end of his rope, screamed: “I’m a Jew, I tell you—I’m a Jew!”⁹⁶ Leonard protected himself, silent, “nothing matters” having become his motto. In his last interviews he liked to claim that he had never suffered or even encountered discrimination. Maybe he did not suffer any longer, once the Harry Davis in him had been killed.

In 1939, Virginia notes that Leonard told her he had trained himself to completely avoid all personal feeling.

Did he feel anything the day of their marriage? He records the sober celebration in just a few lines, with no mention of Virginia. What did he remember of it? The registrar’s office opened onto a cemetery. Standing facing the windows, he had looked at the tombstones and thought of the expression: “Till death do us part,” not included in the civil ceremony. That’s all, except for the moment of comic relief: Vanessa (in true Stephenesque style) had interrupted the service: how was she to officially change the name of her son Claudian to Quentin? “One thing at a time,”⁹⁷ had been the answer.

But what Leonard does not mention: his mother was not invited, nor anyone else from his family. Only a dozen close friends … of Virginia.

He would be careful not to mention it in his very adaptable memoirs.

Conjuring away a suppression, an insult, an offense. Accepting them.

If her son passes over the event in silence, if Quentin Bell feigns surprise and assumes this absence had something to do with the wedding date, a letter has been published addressed to Leonard from Marie Woolf, written three days before the marriage; he must have informed her that she was not invited.

Leonard had let himself be castrated.

All his life he would keep quiet in that way. But all his life he would respond to it, unrelentingly, unconsciously, after the fact.

Instinctively, he would restore the balance, without saying as much. He was “Jewish”? Labeled as such? Declared marginal? Then Virginia would be declared “mad.” Each of them marginal and a step away from disgrace. He would suffer in silence. She would struggle. Their captivating, harmonious life, filled with work, with plans, abundant with warm friendships, perennial gardens, cozy rooms, public recognition, would be undermined on both sides by resentment.

And first, the question of children. Forbidden.

Virginia hoped for them, was sure of having them. “My baby shall sleep in the cradle,”⁹⁹ she wrote confidently to her friend Violet Dickinson, who offered her one in an anticipatory gesture. She was pleased with her new home, with its lawn where her “brats” could play.

A few months after their marriage, alone and without informing his wife, Leonard consults several doctors: isn’t it dangerous for Virginia to have a child?

The pretext: she suffers from insomnia, headaches … no doubt largely the effects of unexpressed disappointment and feelings of loss over the marriage that now holds her captive, the paths that have closed to her. “Marriage,” she would confide later to Ethel Smyth, “what about marriage? I married Leonard Woolf in 1912, I think, and almost immediately was ill for 3 years.”¹⁰⁰

But Leonard insists, clandestinely: isn’t it dangerous for her to have a child? Sir George Savage, Virginia’s doctor, considers, on the contrary, that it would do her “a world of good, my dear fellow, do her a world of good!” Leonard promptly dismisses him as a mere socialite and seeks the opinions of many other doctors, whom he always visits alone and none of whom has ever met Virginia. Some of them confirm Leonard’s fears. He also consults Jean Thomas, director of the rest home where Virginia stayed, and whose conclusions—conveyed by Woolf and conforming to his own—surprise Vanessa: “I am rather surprised at your account of Jean’s opinion, for she certainly told me the opposite. Why has she changed? I hope you will get something definite from Savage. After all he does know Virginia and ought really to be the best judge. I suppose Craig can’t tell as much without having seen her or knowing her at all.” But Savage’s opinion is not taken into account. Woolf considers all the other diagnoses, Thomas’s among them, to support his view. “They confirmed my fears and were strongly against her having children. We followed their advice.” We! He would say no more about it. The question was settled. Or rather the edict.¹⁰¹

Without the least participation of his wife, who never saw a single one of those doctors, who was completely ignorant of those consultations, without the slightest discussion, the briefest exchange with her, the decision is made. Leonard imposes it upon Virginia: she will not have children. But “We followed …”

For her, a bell tolls. A verdict. An affront. A new loss, to which she would not be resigned.

The status of mother denied her, which she immediately sublimates, in which she locates her deficiencies, defeat, guilt, failure. It would represent a major verdict toward denying her “normality.”

Aside from the warmth, love, the tenderness, sensuality, and intimacy associated with maternity, to participate in it would be to merge with that “normality” radically called into question here. All her life, Virginia’s encounters with children proved delightful, a joy for both parties. Quentin Bell beamed as he recalled them during our interview session: “I have marvelous childhood memories of her. She took part in our games; she had an imagination that helped her to share our joys and our own imaginations. When she arrived, it was a delight. Virginia is coming today, what fun! She was charming with children.”¹⁰² But all her life, she reeled under their inflicted absence.

“Oh, dearest Gwen,” she wrote to the wife of Jacques Raverat, a French painter who was very close to death, “To think of you is making me cry—why should you and Jacques have had to go through this? … I was going to have written to Jacques about his children, and about my having none—I mean, these efforts of mine to communicate with people are partly childlessness, and the horror that sometimes overcomes me.” She is often angry at herself for not having made Leonard defy the doctors: “My own fault too—a little more self control on my part, & we might have had a boy of 12, a girl of 10: This always makes me wretched in the early hours.”¹⁰³

Later, in Mrs. Dalloway, she would take it out on the omnipotent Dr. Bradshaw, responsible for the suicide of his patient Septimus Warren Smith: “Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalized despair.”¹⁰⁴

Infertility would not have bothered her so much, so often devastated her, or plunged her into so painful and recurrent despair. But to find herself forbidden motherhood by her partner, to have consented to it, to prove powerless before this edict that denied her mental health. A disaster. A violent aggression, a debilitating blow.

A sentence. A sanction. She would submit to it without a fight, it seems, no doubt taking the pretext for proof. She was also too humiliated. Too weighed down with her past and blaming herself, repressing her distress. At the time of the verdict, she does not mention it in her diary, much less in her letters. She would be close to tears when, at the height of her fame, she joked with Vanessa over the recent success of her paintings: “Indeed, I am amazed, a little alarmed (for as you have children, the fame by rights belongs to me).”¹⁰⁵

But a strange symptom affected her whole circle (and their descendants): throughout the long, grave crisis that almost immediately followed Leonard’s announcement of his decision, and during the subsequent, almost successful suicide attempt, no one, much less Leonard, considered that such a loss, such a dictate, such a shock might be the cause of those episodes.

Forbidden children? No one except Virginia would consider the matter further, except to assume it was settled and for the best. “In this I imagine that Leonard was right,” Quentin would write in the biography of his aunt. “It is hard to imagine Virginia as a mother.”¹⁰⁶ The subject was closed.

Anyway, children, what for? Her books would take their place.

Leonard and then Quentin resort to the classic clichés of books having been given birth, and being taken care of, protected as offspring. Leonard’s version: “As with so many serious writers, her books were to her part of herself and felt to be part of herself somewhat in the same way as a mother often seems all her life to feel that her child remains still part of herself.” And further on, “The mother wants the child to be perfect for its own sake, and Virginia, whose attitude towards her books was, as with so many serious writers, maternal, wanted her books to be perfect for their own sake.”¹⁰⁷

So, why have children with him? She could produce them all by herself!

Of course, those children, those novels, conferred upon her a measure of fame that the ones he had renounced may have offered Leonard, but he expresses no regret, not the slightest bitterness, regarding the work that he would not write. His output of essays and communications would be prolific; his life was fulfilling, and he led it with energy, conviction, success, as publisher (with Virginia), as man of politics, essayist, historian, and … skilled gardener. He would become his wife’s passionate publisher and the first and only reader of her manuscripts (but only once finished): their trustworthy and feared judge, whose good opinion was never assumed but nearly always won. He would very naturally merge with her, expertly and perfectly in sync with the domains of Virginia that had remained his, even as he practiced other ones.

“We’ve had such rows with poor old Mother Wolf, who says she never imagined such a slight as not being asked to the wedding,”¹⁰⁸ writes Virginia to Duncan Grant, who was invited.

Is it nonsense to compare the slight suffered by Marie Woolf, supplanted mother, to the one suffered by Virginia Woolf, deprived of becoming a mother—thus supplanted as well?

For what accounts for Leonard’s stubborn resistance to the idea of fatherhood and especially of fathering Virginia’s child? The broader answer lies in his letters from Ceylon, in the rejection, discouragement, and pessimism of that not-so-distant time.

But there is also another answer, for which evidence exists: how to reconcile the idea of descendants, who would be Leonard’s mother’s descendants as well, with Virginia’s visceral contempt for her mother-in-law and her line? Here is Virginia complaining in a letter, “9 Jews, all of whom, with the single exception of Leonard, might well have been drowned without the world wagging one ounce the worse.”¹⁰⁹ How could Leonard reconcile the presence of a child with the arrogant rejection of his origins by its future mother?

A letter from Clive Bell serves as proof. Most revealing, it demonstrates the distressing but inescapable consequences of such a situation within this social circle, and the subtle but palpable atmosphere Leonard lived in. Timorous as Leonard was, he was pushing the limits here, but he ignored that his future brother-in-law Clive would confirm as much. Clive, a few days before the couple’s official engagement, writing to Molly McCarthy, with whom he had a brief affair in May 1912: “Virginia and the Woolf have come to some pretty definite understanding…. It is really very satisfactory, I suppose; but it would be rather horrible to think that, most probably, people would feel for one’s children what none of us can help feeling for Jews.—Oh he’s quite a good fellow—he’s a Jew you know—. Don’t you think it would be rather painful to get oneself into that plight? And Woolf’s family are chosen beyond anything.”¹¹⁰

Again it is the dashing Clive who writes to his mistress Mary Hutchinson three years later: “I wonder why the Jews instituted the rite of circumcision [sic]. Was there money in it, d’you think, as there is in lambs’ tails? Did the Levites traffick in prepuces?”¹¹¹

Thus, within a web of increasingly complex factors, for Leonard, it might have been less a matter of revenge than of an impasse, facing up by giving up.

A precision: nothing is innocuous here. There is no hierarchy in ostracism. The anti-Semitism of the salon weighs as heavily as any other, even the worst kind, to which it is prelude. It is already criminal precisely because it reveals the calm conviction, the acquiescence of those considered eminent. Their acquiescence to discrimination, to hatred of Jews, constitutes their support of the principles upon which Nazism and its European offshoots would be founded.

Mockery, shallow complicity, unexamined prejudices establish a complicit norm and authorize racism, or even worse, make it out to be harmless. Whereas the slightest word uttered in this context, the lack of respect, the self-granted supremacy, the arbitrary, narcissistic, and paranoid contempt are auxiliaries to the crimes that may follow, that they have guaranteed. Barbarity also took root in the Bloomsbury salons and their ilk, all precursors of the reign of the arbitrary that spawned such crimes.

The concentration camps, the gas chambers, the deportation trains, the manhunts, the negation of the living among the living did not suddenly spring up out of nowhere. Neither does any tyranny. They emerged first from the same anecdotes that targeted Leonard Woolf, the atavistic manias of Virginia, the presumptuous jokes and self-importance of their friends, their self-satisfied complicity, their certainty of being right … because they were certain of being so. They authorized the fundamental principle underlying the horror: permissiveness. Arbitrary scorn.

For Virginia, this was a poison, a vital, most inward factor in her self-destruction.

Another precision: such anti-Semitism had nothing to do with religion. On the Woolf side, the family still vaguely maintained certain practices around Marie. But when the nine brothers and sisters married, none of them married anyone of Jewish origin. If, as a child, Leonard had learned to sing in Hebrew, he had also rejected all religious faith. Devoted to politics and philosophy, he would remain steadfastly agnostic.

Nevertheless, compared with Leonard, who agrees, she considers herself an “amateur”: “But I am not a politician: obviously, can only rethink politics very slowly into my own tongue.”¹¹³ In doing so, politics, “rethought,” and “slowly,” becomes political, attuned to the intelligence of history.

Her unexamined anti-Semitic attitude, in contrast to this text, is all the more paradoxical in that her literary practice, her very act of writing, is grounded in her refusal to accept necessarily reductive, received definitions. She takes nothing for granted, nothing as fait accompli. She requires each thing to be fresh each time it appears. Here is the voice of Virginia rebelling against all fixity, all ossification: “In a world which contains the present moment, [said Neville] why discriminate? Nothing should be named lest by doing so we change it. Let it exist, this bank, this beauty, and I.”¹¹⁴

And then that parasitic voice that, in everyday life (the life to which Leonard and their marriage belong), hardens into hackneyed racist clichés, inherited from her ancestors, never analyzed or questioned, never the object of reflection. Never “rethought.” Accepted as is.

Of that voice, of that anti-Semitic fetishism, here are two examples drawn from among so many others. In 1905, while on a cruise to Portugal with her brother, Adrian, Virginia Stephen complained about finding “a great many Portuguese Jews on board, and other repulsive objects, but we keep clear of them.”¹¹⁵

In 1933, the year Hitler took power (which she immediately deplored), Virginia Woolf wrote to Quentin Bell of having nothing to wear to her friends the Hutchinsons’, who were holding an engagement party for their daughter and Victor de Rothschild, “the richest Jew in Europe,” but she refused to go out shopping for “gloves, hat, and shoes, all for a Jew.” A few hours later, when Vanessa returned from the reception, Virginia announced to Quentin how much his mother “didn’t like the flavour of the Jew. Like raw pork, she said. Surely rather an unkind saying?”¹¹⁶

Hard to imagine Virginia’s deep contradictions, her incessant inner resistance, the unconscious, instinctive, surreptitious efforts that summoned her to disguise the reflex reactions, probably even physical, that the constant proximity of a Jew must have caused in her, along with the official tie to a representative of the race she abhorred, even (perhaps especially) if he was closer to her than anyone else in the world, except Vanessa.

Hard to imagine as well the social humiliation that haunted her and that she hoped to overcome by pre-empting it, by going on the offensive to defend herself, by casually announcing her husband’s Jewishness in the same breath as her anti-Semitism which, in her circle, went without saying—which canceled out the significance of having married a Woolf. For Leonard, even Virginia’s anti-Semitism was a trump card, validating and guaranteeing his admission into the only group he recognized as his own.

But it is shame, yes, silent shame that torments Virginia, eats at her, usually without her knowing it. Despite Leonard’s quiet, growing prestige, she suspects the reactions of those closest to them, like Maynard Keynes, an intimate friend, who mentions “Virginia and the Jew,” and congratulates himself for visiting one day and finding Virginia home, “but no Jew.” All this did not mean hostility toward Woolf. He was greatly and increasingly respected in this circle where everyone was bound to the others. Linked to them beyond all amorous rivalries, all justified reproaches, no member missed an opportunity to criticize the others then unaware of it, behind each other’s backs. But Leonard Woolf’s case was different.¹¹⁷

A difference Virginia dreaded facing, before which she shrinks. To the French painter Jacques Raverat, long absent, now in France, incurably ill (and whom she floods with letters in which she exposes her whole soul, breathing with vitality, keeping him alert, persuading him of the significance his life has for her), she answers, when he is surprised at learning nothing of Leonard: “What is my husband like? A Jew: very long nosed and thin, immensely energetic; But why don’t I talk about him is that really you are Anti-Semitic, or used to be, when I was in the sensitive stage of engagement; so that it was then impressed upon me not to mention him.” And joking in a letter a year earlier: “I make him pay for his unfortunate mistake in being born a Jew by discharging the whole business of life.”¹¹⁸

Yes, hard to imagine the violence she had to inflict upon herself and her distress at unconsciously having to maintain this contradiction between the constant, indispensable presence of a companion so dear to her, and the innate, congenital rejection of what, in her own eyes, must forever define him, even if she attributes to him the role of the exceptional Jew. Here we are in the perversion of a perversion.

A poison, and it especially affects Virginia. Leonard knows how to defend himself on this point; his pain has consumed his ability to suffer: he perfects his indifference to the ambient anti-Semitism, which he has trained himself not to notice. Thus, within his circle, he never falters in his role as a most eminent member, embraced by them thanks to his tacit, abiding consent to let them wound him again and again.

A secret wound locked away in a part of him no longer accessible, forbidden even to himself, as he retreats ever further into his increasingly rigid shell. But for all of that, never sacrificing his earnest charm, his laughter, his affability, both warm and distant; his energy, his obstinacy, his legendary pigheadedness; his alternately severe, austere, or childish air; his growing infatuation with animals; his prodigious persuasive and decision-making abilities; his natural osmosis with his circle and his ability to withdraw. His passion for gardening, which might also have been a symbolic means to root himself in the English soil. His often hysterical fits of anger, the last traces of the former, tormented Leonard, who, repressed, explodes. His reputation for wisdom, dignity, vigor. And never sacrificing his obsession to “care for” and protect his wife, who so protected him and who was, who remained, his lifeline. He must thus become hers—and above all, he must make it common knowledge.

How often she would describe to her friends and her sister Marie Woolf’s birthdays: “10 Jews sat round me … imagine eating birthday cake with silent Jews at 11 pm.” To Ottoline Morrell, the refined hostess of those grand receptions Virginia adored and Leonard avoided: “I do nothing but read Borrow, when I’m not dining with 22 Jews to celebrate my mother in laws 84th birthday.” The latter exasperates her for considering her children, “these dull plain serviceable Jews & Jewesses … all splendid men & women.” And when they are invited to Rodmell, she sizes them up: “dressed, like all Jews, as if for high tea in a hotel lounge, never mixing with the country, talking nasally, talking incessantly, but requiring at intervals the assurance that I think it really jolly to have them. ‘I am so terribly sensitive Virginia’ my mother in law says pensively, refusing honey, but sending me into the kitchen to find strawberry jam.” Often Virginia’s anti-Semitism merged with a classic aversion to mother-in-laws.¹²⁰

She sometimes felt a fondness for this woman who was always anxious to see her, worried she hadn’t come if Leonard entered first. Their visits with Marie were apparently affectionate and courteous. She admired Virginia and, on her deathbed after a fall, told Virginia that she should call her next novel Fallen Woman. Nevertheless, Virginia refrained from developing tender feelings for her, and when she found herself feeling daughterly affection one day, immediately the image of a terrifying mother, ready to seize her in her clutches, arose.

That reaction of horror and terror had nothing to do with Marie’s Jewishness or Virginia’s snobbishness, but with a fantasy of fatal proximity, of threatening, inescapable intimacy, that made Mrs. Woolf the universal maternal symbol that threatens every daughter, in this case, Virginia, even if their connection was only through Leonard: “To be attached to her as a daughter would be so cruel a fate that I can think of nothing worse; & thousands of women might be dying of it in England today: this tyranny of mother over daughter, or father, their right to the due being as powerful as anything in the world. And then, they ask, why women dont write poetry. Short of killing Mrs W nothing could be done!” And again: “How many daughters have been murdered by women like this! What a net of falsity they spread over life. How it rots beneath their sweetness—goes brown and soft like a bad pear!”¹²¹

Here we recognize the “Angel in the House” from A Room of One’s Own, which each woman must kill within herself in order to be free. What a strange confusion! Marie Woolf displaces Julia Stephen, Virginia’s mother, dead so early on, so sublimated, so equivocal, whom Virginia is “to want and want and not to have.” And whose power over her daughters and their father, irresistible when she was alive, remains inextinguishable and more tyrannical after her death. What does Virginia want to kill? The death of her mother, surely; the death of the untrustworthy dead, a pervasive ghost. For whom Mrs. Woolf, alive, must pay.¹²²

Poor Marie Woolf, whose great power is reduced to reminding her son of her right to gratitude for never going to bed, as a young widow, without a basket of socks to darn for company; to punctual visits from her children; to celebrations of her famous birthdays—daunting, it is true, if we are to believe an overwhelmed Virginia, who describes plans to celebrate: “And on Wednesday the Jews assemble and poor 80 chocolats in the form of sovereigns into the lap of the Mother Woolf who is 80; and there will be a cheque among them for that sum.”¹²³ All to be followed by parlor games.

But here is “Mother Woolf,” whose status of “Jewish mother” changes to symbolic universal mother, the bane of tyrannized daughters; here is Virginia, spellbound, who briefly, passionately, takes her for a maternal symbol. Virginia who is then stricken, disconcerted, and who resists, as when Marie confides to her an unconfessed secret of her adolescence.

A furtive intimacy, which the daughter-in-law dreads, sometimes brings the two women closer over the years. Inhibitions are immediately awakened in Virginia, a wild terror, emotions Marie Woolf is not the true object of, even though she may have revived them by her emotional power and her easy acceptance of the role of mother. Virginia would be moved when Mrs. Woolf confessed to her that, of all her daughters-in-law, Virginia was her favorite.

And Virginia thanks her nephew Julian Bell, Vanessa’s oldest son, who paid a visit to Bella, one of Marie Woolf’s “unfortunate” daughters: “my mother in law was delighted that according to you I am very fond of her. That was a master stroke—I am, in a way; but how did you know it?”¹²⁴

The old woman’s grief over the death of her daughter Clara would, for once, get the better of Virginia:

Leonard’s sister you see … died, poor woman; literally was killed by her husband; and I went up to see my mother in law; and really it would have drawn tears from a stone—poor old woman, aged 84, she’d sat up 2 nights with the dying and the husband [George Walker], a cheap American ruffian, with whom she’d quarreled violently; there they sat side by side and the daughter died between them; and my mother in law said, “She asked so little of life”—an extraordinarily good epitaph: “And why am I left alive?”—and then there was the funeral and all the Jews came to Tavistock Square and sat round like prophets in their black clothes and top hats denouncing unrighteousness.¹²⁵

Marcel Proust comes to mind again, and Swann, who “belonged to that stout Jewish race, in whose vital energy, its resistance to death, its individual members seem to share.” The narrator goes on to describe the moment of death when “One can see only a prophet’s beard surmounted by a huge nose which dilates to inhale its last breath, before the hour strikes for the ritual prayer and the punctual procession of distant relatives begins, advancing with mechanical movements as upon an Assyrian frieze.”¹²⁶

But, again, how can Virginia’s horror for even the word, “Jew,” accommodate the flesh and bone, the very substance, of the Jew who lives and breathes permanently at her side? How can she endlessly express a visceral hostility for what he must represent to her, even as she affectionately calls him “my Jew.” “Lord!” she writes to Ethel Smyth. “How I detest these savers up of merit, these gorged caterpillars; my Jew has more religion in one toe nail—more human love, in one hair.”¹²⁷

Even as a newlywed, this was her thank-you note for armchairs received as a wedding gift: “my Jew had the one with the green border.” At a reception that Virginia found ghastly, “a good deal of misery was endured[,] Jews swarmed,” she found it quite natural that Leonard got on very well with Gertrude Stein, the guest of honor, himself being also a Jew. And Gertrude Stein seen as a Jewess, not a writer.¹²⁸

Virginia’s alarming masochism, bound to what she detests and what has neither shape nor reality, but for which Leonard serves as her image—and Leonard’s masochism in letting her detest what has neither shape nor reality, even as he represents it and accepts her scorn. Even though she respects and often admires him. Unconsciously, perpetually conflicted with herself. Leonard’s solution: to be generally perceived as dominating her and declaring the law.

Whatever their alliance, their pleasure at being together, their affection, their oneness, how could they not hate each other, despite themselves, somewhere deep within?

Such underground operations can only erode the apparent peace that unites the couple. In 1937, they surface, resistant and triumphant, in a novel: The Years. The saga of the Pargiter family. A book written under duress because Virginia has forbidden herself any spontaneous outbursts. She has planned it to be a traditional, even academic novel, based on straightforward narrative, although “I am writing to a rhythm and not to plot”¹²⁹ had been her watchword. Now she would tell a story, neither evoking nor invoking her subject. Her priority for this narrative: The Years must differ from her other novels. None of which holds the slight trace of anything having to do with Judaism, much less anti-Semitism, a topic Virginia only addresses in her personal writing, her letters and her diary. Until now: only three or four pages, but there we find the unspoken madness, the nausea Virginia experienced in living with Leonard Woolf, a Jew, who would contaminate their space, as she dreaded. Pages where Leonard serves as a model of what she despises, what she abhors, but which she seems never to acknowledge feeling as a kind of repugnance aimed at her husband. And which seems so at odds with the delightful familiarity, the mental and emotional closeness that will make them come to resemble each other physically as they grow older.

In this novel, which was meant to be objective, realistic, and free of all personal disclosures, where the unconscious was hardly to have a role, the very worst, most repressed symptom appears, elsewhere kept at bay. In pages that are lyrical even as Virginia meant them to be temperate, steady, concerned most with the story, a song filters through and bursts out, barbaric, unbridled, in Sara Pargiter’s voice … and it is Virginia’s song, which she thought she had renounced.

Sara Pargiter, ugly, vacant spinster, eternally puerile, slightly impaired mentally and physically, without purpose, Sara, almost inarticulate but lyrical, sometimes pierces through this determinedly realistic, even prosaic text with her irrational outbursts, unconnected to the story. Scansion animates her voice, litanies carry it, and thus what we hear through her are very much the rhythms, accents, outbursts of the author. And what this voice expresses, in a scene that has no other reason to be there, is her instinctive, visceral disgust for a Jew about whom we know nothing, except that he is Jewish. In 1937, Hitler is in power, and in The Years, which has just appeared, Sara’s small voice says: “The Jew … pah!”¹³⁰

The scene bears no relation to the rest of the novel; there is no need for it—except as a release valve for Virginia. There is no sequel to it, and it could go unnoticed in the thick chronicle. What escapes through Sara is a certain madness, out of line with the conventional saga unfolding.

Sara’s cousin, North, comes to visit and is chatting with her; they haven’t seen each other in a long time, and the conversation stops abruptly, interrupted by the sound of water. The water that runs throughout Virginia’s work, as though pointing the way to the River Ouse. But in other novels, it is the sea, waves, rivers, the water “like a drowned sailor on the shore of the world,” or that of “the depths of the sea…. only water after all.” Whereas here it becomes a matter of plumbing, loud faucets. It is the dirty water of the Jew, the other:¹³¹

“The Jew,” she [Sara] murmured.

“The Jew?” he said. They listened. He could hear quite distinctly now. Somebody was turning on taps; somebody was having a bath in the room opposite.

“The Jew having a bath,” she said.

“The Jew having a bath?” he repeated.

“And tomorrow there’ll be a line of grease around the bath,” she said.

“Damn the Jew!” he exclaimed. The thought of a line of grease from a strange man’s body on the bath next door disgusted him.¹³²

They share the same repulsion, as if it were a given. They listen to the running water again, the man coughing and clearing his throat while he scrubs.

When the Jew first appeared, Sara had thought of a river. She had run outside enraged, stopped on a bridge, amid a crowd. “And I said, ‘Must I join your conspiracy? Stain the hand, the unstained hand … and sign on, and serve a master; all because of a Jew in my bath, all because of a Jew?’”¹³⁶

Ravings? Revelations!

What other body shares Virginia’s bath except Leonard’s, a Jew?

But into the water of the River Ouse, Leonard never entered.

He was the first to read these pages where Virginia Woolf, porous to all voices, intercepts the most vile of them this time, which is hers, and which, stifled until now, rises to an outcry. And which denounces Leonard Woolf.

One type of water hardly runs at all through the Woolfian corpus: tears. But, according to Virginia, with this text, tears did run: Leonard’s. Virginia is not at all well after five tortuous years of working on this book she considers bad, “an odious rice pudding.” So bad, when she entrusts the proofs to Leonard she asks him to burn them unread and flees. “It was cold & dry & very grey & I went out & walked through the graveyard with Cromwell’s daughters Tomb down through Grays Inn along Holborn & so back.”¹³⁷

She feels “very tired. Very old. But at [the] same time content to go on these 100 years with Leonard.” They have lunch, she figures out how to repay the cost of the proofs and falls “into one of my horrid heats & deep slumbers, as if the blood in my head were cut off. Suddenly L. put down his proof & said that he thought it extraordinarily good—as good as any of them. And now he is reading on….” Two days later: “The miracle is accomplished. L. put down the last sheet about 12 last night; & could not speak. He was in tears.”¹³⁸

He says he finds this novel better than The Waves. But in his autobiography, he admits to having known “that unless I could give a completely favourable verdict she would be in despair and would have a very serious breakdown…. I had always read her books immediately after she had written the last word and always given an absolutely honest opinion. The verdict on The Years which I now gave her was not absolutely and completely what I thought about it.” All the same, “it was obviously not in any way as bad as she thought it to be.” But too long and “not really as good as The Waves, To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway. To Virginia I praised the book more than I should have done.”¹³⁹ Those tears? They weren’t tears of emotion because the text was so beautiful, or even disastrous. So how to account for them? In these pages, he had just read the scene of the foul Jew, staining both the bathtub and the soul of the anti-Semitic Sara, who issues from his wife’s very core. Could they be tears of discouragement, rage, defeat, or even of simple sadness? Those tears, which he will not mention. Unless, of course, Virginia was exaggerating.

Epilogue: The Years, which does not lack Woolfian charm, although it does lack her magic. The Years, deliberately more conventional, stylistically more sedate than her usual work, would be (is it any surprise?) Virginia’s greatest commercial success. In the United States that year, only Gone with the Wind would outsell it.

Now to a taboo question: where among the countless, often magnificent books devoted to Virginia is her anti-Semitism discussed? So recurrent, spontaneous as a tic, expressed casually and as though a given, in keeping with her circle, why is it almost never mentioned, never or rarely alluded to, and sometimes even denied? For fear of turning readers against her? Because that would seem irreverent? Because no one wants to admit it? Because it’s not important, just “one of those things”? Because such disillusioning exactitude threatens the immunity and redemption granted her work? Because no one wants to tarnish its author or question the already suspect illusion of her “purity”? But also, why doesn’t it turn me against her and all that she offers?

A life’s paths lead in many directions, and Virginia Woolf’s paths can be unexpected, without compromising her absolute demand for exactitude regarding her passions and propensities. A demand usually met. She does not misjudge herself in this, or lack the courage to express herself. And her spontaneous, inescapable self-awareness would allow for natural evolution, so that shortly after demonstrating such clear, sane, exceptional political awareness in Three Guineas, she would affirm, without the least ostentation or appearance of contradicting herself, “we are Jews,” and speak of “our Jewishness” with regard to her marriage. This at the time when Nazism triumphs.¹⁴⁰

She would take part in antifascist movements, which was always her orientation, though anti-Semitism seemed a given, part of the unwritten family code, almost tribal in some way, and considered a form of savoir faire, proper to her circle—rather than an expression of its perversity and a key to the crimes that were about take place.

Was she truly free from its grip, from the tradition handed down through generations? Yes, with regard to thinking, action, profession of faith—but at the visceral, unconscious level of her physical being?

Perhaps anti-Semitism suited her to the point of becoming necessary to her, so that she never considered thinking about it, applying her intelligence to it, that intelligence that led her, in Three Guineas, to a political awareness running counter to such impulses.

“We knew,” their friend the poet Stephen Spender, also blacklisted, told me, “that if the Nazis arrived, we would be sent to the concentration camps: we were on Hitler’s blacklist, and if the Germans landed, we would have to be arrested immediately.”¹⁴¹ In May 1940, Leonard who, strangely, never considered resisting, proposed a joint suicide to his wife if the Germans invaded, which seemed imminent.

A suicide … by gas. In the garage, he stockpiled gasoline. She immediately accepted. Here is Virginia Stephen included in the fate of the Jews, in solidarity with Leonard. And Leonard: “we discussed again calmly what we should do if Hitler landed. The least that I could look forward to as a Jew, we knew, would be to be ‘beaten up.’ We agreed that, if the time came, there would be no point in waiting; we would shut the garage door and commit suicide.”¹⁴²

Virginia’s version, almost identical: “This morning we discussed suicide if Hitler lands. Jews beaten up. What point in waiting. Better to shut the garage doors. This is a sensible, rather matter of fact talk. Then he wrote letters, & I too: thanked Bernard Shaw for his love letter.” But a few lines later, this protest: “No, I dont want the garage to see the end of me. I’ve a wish for 10 years more, & to write my book wh. as usual darts into my brain.” She has decided to follow Leonard, but “its all bombast, this war. One old lady pinning on her cap has more reality. So if one dies, it’ll be a common sense, dull end—not comparable to a days walk, & then an evening reading over the fire.”¹⁴³

The war—the tears it prompted even before it began and which Virginia remembers over the course of those months, “while all the guns are pointed & charged & no one dares pull the trigger. Not a sound this evening to bring in the human tears. I remember the sudden profuse shower one night just before war wh. made me think of all men & women weeping.”¹⁴⁴

The triggers, the guns worked. The garage was ready. France was going to fall, invasion threatened—“our waiting while the knives sharpen for the operation,” and June 9: “I will continue—but can I? … A sample of my present mood, I reflect: capitulation will mean all Jews to be given up. Concentration camps. So to our garage. Thats behind correcting Roger, playing bowls…. Another reflection: I dont want to go to bed at midday: this refers to the garage.”¹⁴⁵

Nine months later, she would end her life, alone. Leonard would survive her by twenty-eight years.

A suicide results from a network of factors, not a single cause. It is not yet the time for us to go all the way to the River Ouse. Only to remark that because of his (justified) anxiety, Leonard, the pillar, the rock, proposes a joint suicide to a woman who has already attempted it and whom he considers fragile, verging on madness. The idea of suicide is thus introduced to her, very concretely and precisely, by the champion of reason within an arena that has turned tragic, and into which Virginia resolutely follows him. She very simply enters with him into the Jewish fate, without a shadow of theatricality and despite her desire to live.

From anti-Semitic fantasies she moves to the reality of inhuman history. She shares the ordeal of the marked victims, those most threatened. Body and soul. She engages fully. With her whole being. “We are Jews.”¹⁴⁶

She seems unaware of the evolution she has undergone, on a personal level, in her marriage, and regarding antifascism as well. She may not necessarily have forsworn the hackneyed litany she unconsciously recited to condemn the Jews, but what pleasure would it give her now? Even Marie Woolf, her favorite target, has been dead and buried almost two years.

The disorder, the unvoiced part of that disorder, the physical disgust, the fantasy of the Jewish body and the word “Jew,” that specific disease that surfaces only in The Years as the irrational, instinctive repugnance expressed by Sara, must have always lain beneath the deep understanding and harmony Virginia and her Jewish husband shared. And at this point the disorder itself becomes disordered, part of an imaginary construct.

Or rather, with the war, this disorder alone remains, irrational, visceral, screened by its public expression, the blatant, hackneyed anti-Semitism so commonplace in their circle: the unwitting insults, the clichés automatically linked to anything Jewish. These stereotyped, knee-jerk reactions mask and in some way banish a certain irrational, hallucinated terror. For now, labeling Leonard “Jewish” is innocuous. But that label’s effect on Hitler cancels any other effect, makes it truly bad form.

Without the store of insults, the anti-Semitic clichés, the physical presence and raw substance of a tangible “Jew,” of Leonard, remain. And everything they evoke of what is invisible and disturbing, disguised or even exorcised until then by the hackneyed anti-Semitic repertoire, aimed at stereotypes, not live bodies. The atavistic loathing remains, perhaps, but goes unvoiced now. Impossible to express henceforth. To consciously feel.

Will Virginia’s perception of Leonard change now that she cannot set him apart from other Jews? Might she lose some of her authority over him, now that he is freed from the label that allowed her circle to judge him … in a case already decided against him, since Leonard Woolf was a Jew. “We are Jews,”¹⁴⁷ says Virginia Stephen now.

Perhaps renouncing her racist fantasies, or banishing them, made her more fragile? A whole network of unconsidered landmarks collapses with them, a solid structure, a part of her personality, a familiar hysteria upon which they may rely. That exhilaration of acquired dominance, being in league with her circle, the arrogance of a kind of condoned cruelty punctuated her life, and perhaps she felt protected in the narrow, rigid corset of arbitrary certitudes and spitefulness. But especially in the stasis of fixed beliefs, within a space constricted enough for doubts and anxieties to fade, without room for oscillation; in holding racist positions whereby the pain and dreaded humiliation are blindly inflicted upon others, while personal rejection shuts them out.

It will not be gas that will do in Virginia Woolf ten months later, but water. The water that runs throughout the work, that calls, drowns, surrounds, attracts her from all sides and toward which Virginia, spellbound, is headed all her life, going there to be swallowed up, “exhausted swimmer,”¹⁴⁸ the body lovingly embraced by water. “There was an embrace in death.”¹⁴⁹

And now, it is to Virginia the newborn that we must return, to Virginia Stephen, then to Virginia Woolf and their secret, and those of others.

In passing, we will learn … who Leonard married. And especially, who lived this life devoted to detecting life, reviving it, extracting it from its futility, capturing it in her pages, saved from lifelessness, fixed in its transience.

It took three weeks to find her body. Only Leonard would attend the cremation. The sublime cavatina of Beethoven’s Thirteenth Quartet would not be played, though they had remarked one evening when they were listening to the music (Leonard kept a list of the records they listened to) how well it was suited to a cremation. “There is a moment in the middle of the cavatina when for a few bars the music, of incredible beauty, seems to hesitate with a gentle forward pulsing motion—if played at that moment it might seem to be gently propelling the dead into eternity of oblivion. Virginia agreed with me…. When I made arrangements for Virginia’s funeral, I should have liked to arrange this.” But he was unable to arrange it. “The long-drawn-out horror of the previous weeks had produced in me a kind of inert anaesthesia. It was as if I had been so battered and beaten.” To his indignant surprise, Gluck’s “Blessed Spirits” was played. After returning home that evening, Leonard listened to the cavatina.¹⁵⁰

Alone, he buried her ashes at the foot of one of the two elms, their branches entangled, that they had named Leonard and Virginia. The tree would be uprooted one stormy night.

Leonard is alone. He changes nothing in his professional life. As early as the next day, he would go to see their lawyer. He refuses invitations. Vita describes for Harold her visit to Rodmell:

The house was full of his [Leonard’s] flowers, and all Virginia’s things lying about as usual…. There was her needle-work on a chair and her coloured wools hanging over a sort of little towelhorse which she had made for them. Her thimble on the table. Her scribbling block with her writing on it…. I said, “Leonard, I do not like your being here alone like this.” He turned those piercing blue eyes on me and said, “It is the only thing to do.”¹⁵¹

He wrote this note found with his papers at his death:

But Leonard would not be the stoic, solitary widower of Rodmell, vestal for a sacerdotal wife, forever in the grip of his ruined marriage, as we might have imagined. Less than a year later, the austere Leonard falls madly in love. A passionate love affair that would last twenty-seven years, until his death.

No one would be surprised by it: Trekkie Parson is blonde and round, jovial, with a keen sense of the prosaic, the most mediocre of painters. She will not leave her husband, Ian Parson, a publisher like Leonard, with whom he would graciously share his wife, especially since he himself is having an affair that makes Trekkie jealous. Her relationship with Leonard would remain platonic; this time the alibi is age and his long abstinence, officially blamed on Virginia.

Trekkie soon replaces Virginia at Rodmell, without ever separating from Ian. A three-part arrangement: Trekkie Parson divides her time between Leonard and Ian, spending weekends and some vacations with her husband, weekdays and other vacations with Leonard. They often find themselves a threesome. The Parsons will become Leonard’s tenants in his London flat; they buy a house in a village neighboring Rodmell.

The Parsons’ interest? This bond with Woolf will let Ian, clearly aided by his wife, achieve one of his dreams: for a long time he has watched for the opportunity to acquire for Chatto & Windus (his own publishing house and one of the biggest in England) the Hogarth Press, the Woolfs’ publishing house, much smaller in size, but the premier press of its day, among the most sophisticated and prestigious.

An impassioned, enthralling business for the couple and of major importance to Leonard; an immense triumph, carried out together with astounding, unforeseen success and creating a permanent bond between them. Leonard will take on more responsibility; editing will become his profession, his public identity, even more so than author, man of politics, or publisher; Virginia’s will always be limited to writer.

When they bought (on sale) a printing press and installed it in their dining room in 1917, Leonard and Virginia hardly imagined that they had just founded one of England’s most distinguished publishing houses. Their chief goals were to maintain Virginia’s stability—she had just emerged from a serious crisis—with the help of a concrete occupation in her realm of interest, and to amuse themselves by printing and publishing a few texts written by them and their friends.

They tackled Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude next, and soon bought a more modern press, as the first one printed only one page at a time. Soon they would seek out other printers, but for a long time they would continue to print certain works themselves in their dining room, binding them in the pantry.

Having become a renowned publishing house, the Hogarth Press, which began in Richmond, would always be part of their London residence. Printers, bookbinders, authors were received there. The room where Virginia wrote would serve as warehouse. “She had a large stripped wooden desk in it, surrounded by the piles of parcels of Hogarth books straight from the binders, which also overflowed into the corridor,”¹⁵⁴ remembers John Lehmann, who worked at Hogarth in 1930.

Even when the Hogarth Press was thriving and Virginia was famous, she would lend a hand in emergencies. When orders flooded in following the release of a new book, she would always work in the room with the employees, tying parcels, gluing labels. In a holiday atmosphere, joking, eating biscuits, while “young authors, coming in to leave a precious manuscript and dreaming of encountering the famous author, would never suspect that they were actually in her presence as the figure in the drab overalls busied herself with scissors and string.”¹⁵⁵

She would read manuscripts up until the end, literary ones, attentively and passionately. Leonard would read them all, including the essays. How many writers worked as closely with books as she did? How many were as familiar with the humble tasks of book making, which granted her a physical knowledge of books? She often noted in her diary when her hands trembled from carrying packages. Ink-stained hands that handled typeface, fingered paper, tied bundles. She and Leonard shared the tasks of selecting binding paper, finding cover illustrations, distributing the books.

The Woolfs always bore the entire financial risk for an enterprise begun with no capital. Few writers, and even fewer at that time, understood the business and technology of the literary profession as Virginia did. Her muscles, her body had experienced the actual weight of books, parcels of them; countless volumes she and Leonard themselves supplied to local bookstores on the automobile tours they took regularly as late as 1940. To a friend, Virginia asserted that the Hogarth Press was more work than six little brats.

Leonard instantly, intrinsically, became an editor and proved to be an unparalleled businessman, audacious and patient, an immediate authority in the publishing and literary worlds. As author and editor of his own work, he would stand by those he published; like Virginia, he could be both intimate and severe, and often very kind. The couple made no concessions in their choice of books and writers, and often rejected manuscripts from friends who were a part of their life.

Improvising at first, but soon proving to be an exceptional administrator, Woolf was in love with Hogarth and would take care to maintain it on a human scale. Possessive, nervous, sometimes despotic, perhaps he let loose a bit here, let down the mask and voiced the hysterical protests he repressed elsewhere. John Lehmann, among others, bore the brunt of this. A writer himself, Rosamond Lehmann’s brother, he began working for the Hogarth Press when he was twenty-four years old; he lasted only eighteen months that first time, and he confided in me, still bitter:

Virginia described his arrival to Clive Bell: “Young Mr Lehmann is now installed in the back room behind the W.C. at a small table with a plant which Leonard has given him on the window sill.”¹⁵⁷

Hogarth Press’s main asset: a top-quality, often innovative catalogue. T. S. Eliot was to be found there from the first, among other young poets, like Stephen Spender; Katherine Mansfield, R. M. Rilke, E. M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, Gertrude Stein, Christopher Isherwood, Keynes, Hölderlin, Melanie Klein, Henry Green, and so on. And of course, Virginia Woolf and Leonard. But also all the works of Freud, translated into English by James Strachey, whose authorized critical apparatus would earn an international reputation.

It was that publishing house, that catalogue, which Ian Parson dreamed of acquiring. An old dream, dating back much further than 1938, the year John Lehmann returned to Hogarth, bought Virginia’s shares, and became Leonard’s partner (which did not change Virginia’s role in the least). Alice Ritchie, one of the Woolfs’ authors who also worked at the press, gossiped to her sister … Trekkie Parson: the Hogarth Press had been sold. Ian Parson reacts. Leonard denies it. Alice apologizes and writes to him: “The thing is that Ian has always had a day-dream of some sort of amalgamation between Chatto and the Hogarth Press. He often talked to me about it and when he heard, in the way of gossip, that the Press was sold he was in despair and begged me to ask you if indeed all hope for him was over.”¹⁵⁸ That was the end of it.

At least until 1946, eight years later. Virginia has been dead five years. The threesome they comprise with Trekkie has brought the two men closer. Leonard has become and fancies himself the beau of Trekkie Parson, still attached to her husband, still officially Ian’s wife, though she and Leonard are known as a couple who dance divinely together, entertain admirably, and like to drink. Leonard (whose wine cellar is well stocked) is, to their delight, most easily influenced.

Trekkie designs book covers for Hogarth, where she spends much time and manages to spark conflicts between Woolf and Lehmann, as well as between Lehmann and herself. “It was after Virginia’s death that the real difficulties with Leonard began,”¹⁵⁹ John Lehmann confided in me in 1973, and still seemed bitter, twenty-seven years later, at having seen his life thrown off course. He had not read the letters in which Leonard Woolf responds to Trekkie’s complaints and supports her against Lehmann regarding printing problems, telling her to let him know if John “bristles” and doesn’t give in.

Woolf himself gives in. Ian buys the shares from John Lehmann, who, being too impulsive, finally makes a false move. The Hogarth Press is subsumed into Chatto & Windus, the larger publishing house, and is no longer exclusively Leonard’s, even though, as full partner in the new company, he continues to direct it, with full editorial freedom guaranteed.

Mrs. Parson’s entry into Leonard’s life does not seem without advantages for Mr. Parson, whose dream has now become a reality. A coincidence? Alice Ritchie’s letter raises questions about what transpired between Ian and Leonard, one absorbing the other’s enterprise and fulfilling a lifelong wish. And Leonard, so stubborn, so tenacious, renouncing his possessiveness, his demand for exclusive rights to Hogarth, and declaring himself grateful to Ian Parson—he insists on this in the autobiography—for helping him get rid of John Lehmann, out of the kindness of his heart….

Much later, when he steps down amiably because of his age, his letter of resignation will nevertheless express some bitterness, alluding to that promised but severely limited authority and editorial freedom.

A new Leonard emerges on the scene, passionately in love, transfixed. Their correspondence has now been published: “Tiger, darling tiger,”¹⁶⁰ his “dear queen,” was thirty-two years younger (although she hardly seems so in photographs). Imperturbable duo: he, always the more ardent and dependent, and willingly so; she, calm, epicurean, solidly grounded, ably controlling his life.

They would travel extensively together. Among their destinations: the United States, Israel, Canada, Greece and even … Ceylon. Returning with great ceremony, Leonard is received there as a hero. There where The Village in the Jungle is still a best-seller. He even took Trekkie to Hambantota. She would be fascinated by the birds there.

Their deep, shared passion for gardening, animals, flowers (which she painted prolifically) created a symbiosis between them. She sent him dismaying poems, which he admired. She truly loved to paint, but was (justly) considered an amateur, a good student of painting, except by Leonard who, unlike Ian Parson, saw in her a great artist and encouraged her. Her paintings are not exactly crude, only mediocre. She did produce a handsome, if academic, portrait of Leonard, and one drawing for which we can almost forgive her anything. An Annunciation in which the Angel appears in the open countryside to Leonard who, hands in his pockets, looks right through him and says: “I don’t believe a word of it.”¹⁶¹ If the caption is Trekkie’s, hats off to her!

The former circle, especially the Bloomsbury contingent, is still there, but they maintain their distance from the Parsons. Leonard retains his role among them, without Trekkie. As before the war, they still gather as the Memoir Club, where Keynes, Grant, the Bells, Forster, and others read, each in turn, from sometimes shocking, unadulterated memoirs in which the pathos is heightened by being shrouded in humor. Here, for example, Virginia read “Am I a Snob?” or “22 Hyde Park Gate” or “The Old Bloomsbury.” Her portrait hangs on the wall now, beside Roger Fry’s and Lytton Strachey’s, all three dead. Leonard attends regularly, now immune to all subtle, possible, and improbable anti-Semitic barbs, either more or less implicit. He has escaped that mire, he has crossed that threshold. Since the war is over, has the time of discrimination and its arrogances passed? Sometimes it seems doubtful; traces of it remain.

One example: Christmas 1944. For the English, the war has basically ended; the Nazis are defeated. The truth is out about the genocide, the camps and their atrocities. Virginia is dead. So are so many others. In London, there is peace. Keynes and his wife, Lydia, are giving a costume ball. Vanessa, preparing for it, reports she has “been busy routing out our old theatrical properties—a mask for Clive, and other garments to make him look like a very obscene little girl. Duncan is making himself a wonderful wolf’s mask. Q’s [Quentin] Father C[hristmas] is a horrible old Jew who will terrify the children.”¹⁶² After Auschwitz, it is still the Jew who is terrifying!? And horrible? Apparently!