Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

“ALL the walls, the protecting & reflecting walls, wear so terribly thin in this war.” And soon: “No audience. No echo. Thats part of one’s death.” Especially as her solitude with Leonard increases and the rampart formed by the public, friends, others gradually dissolves.¹

But at first, after they leave London to take permanent refuge at Monk’s House, there will be the happiness of days that ring “from one simple melody to another,” and Virginia will have “never had a better writing season.” For months, she will be seized with a passionate desire to live despite the pact we know about, her joint suicide pact with Leonard, should England be invaded. She will still cast herself entirely into a future time, under bombardment at Rodmell and its surroundings every evening, located in the air corridor between continental Europe and London.²

Around her, friends like Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman & Nation, discuss possible suicides. “I dont want to die yet,” she says to Leonard, hearing the bombs. But in her pocket, morphine provided by Adrian. Morphine, the garage, the suicide envisioned by Leonard if the Nazis…. And she has book projects for at least ten years “if Hitler doesn’t drop a splinter into my machine.” The vanquished continent of Europe belongs almost entirely to the Nazis.³

Virginia sighs: “Yes, I was thinking: we live without a future.” Even Marie Woolf finally dies in July 1939, after holding out against old age like “a cricketer doing a record score.” Anti-Semitism is no longer in fashion. The Bloomsbury crowd has dispersed; the gasoline shortage prevents them from getting together often. Virginia searches the ruins of the London apartment, destroyed during a bombing raid, to find her diaries and her parents’ letters. Hogarth Press is partly moved out of town; John Lehmann (to whom Virginia sold her shares while still retaining her role at the publishing house) takes over the day-to-day operations. Leonard only goes to London once or twice a week. He and Virginia are still selling books to the bookstores in 1940.⁴

But gradually time grinds to a halt, and Virginia, far from everyone, insidiously neglected by Leonard, slips into a fatal isolation: “Those familiar circumvolutions—those standards—which have for so many years given back an echo & so thickened my identity are all wide & wild as the desert now. I mean, there is no ‘autumn’ no winter…. I cant conceive that there will be a 27th June 1941.”⁵ For her, there won’t be one.

After having worked, struggled, as in every moment of her life, but this time struggling against the worst threats with the worst weapons, Virginia Woolf in isolation would founder.

Alone, confined, adrift.

“The play was over, the strangers gone.”⁶ Nearly every page of Between the Acts utters a calm, inexorable farewell, to what is no more than the territory of farewell. But a farewell that she is still observing, without preparing herself for it.

Whatever makes her capsize, this work is not to blame. On the contrary, it exorcises its content. Despite the havoc of the war, Virginia feels productive again, as hungry for books as when she was a child, and finds herself “a little triumphant about the book. I think its an interesting attempt in a new method. I think its more quintessential than the others…. I’ve enjoyed writing almost every page.”⁷ She has five months left to live.

But she notes that she must write those pages in the intervals left by “the drudgery of Roger.”⁸ That disaster.

Roger’s family, in league with the rest of Bloomsbury, traps her into writing the dead painter’s biography. Virginia resists, then acquiesces, and we can only think bitterly of the pack that makes her waste her powers on such useless labor. She feels hounded by those who had known Fry, who seem to be reading over her shoulder; nervously she watches herself confronting her “hero,” whose schizophrenic wife was institutionalized shortly after their marriage and spent the rest of her life that way. Virginia struggles under Roger Fry’s voluminous papers, articles, bills, manuscripts, agendas, under the letters he wrote and received, among them intimate exchanges with Nessa … who advises her sister to publish all of it and adds, “I hope you wont mind making us all blush.”⁹ But Virginia refuses to mention anything that involves lovers, Roger’s private life; so many things must not be said, or only alluded to. A process of censorship.

And martyrdom above all. “An experiment in self suppression,” she complains. And it’s true!¹⁰ A serious one. She persists, entrenched in it since before the war; it will take two years. Two wasted years. The book will be uninteresting.

One Sunday in March 1940, during a walk in the fields around Rodmell, Leonard, who has just read the proofs, criticizes Virginia’s work for the first and only time, and violently. It is the editor who speaks, but it is the wife who suffers: “It was like being pecked by a very hard strong beak. The more he pecked the deeper, as always happens. At last he was almost angry that I’d chosen ‘what seems to me the wrong method. Its merely anal[ysis], not history. Austere repression. In fact dull to the outside. All those dead quotations.’”¹¹ He’s right, despite his blows from such a cruel—and virile—beak.

But no matter, since, reading it, Vanessa breaks down in tears over the life of her former lover, forever her dear friend: “I’m crying cant thank you.” And Virginia, ecstatic: “Lord to have given back Nessa her Roger….”¹²

But that isn’t all. Virginia had played with taking Roger from Nessa, and through this dead man, we see her return to the time when she stole Clive from her sister. Her discomfort with Roger Fry’s memory, her rejection of his emotions and private life, stem in part from her fantasies about him and herself. No doubt she once envied his passionate love for Vanessa, who, once burned and distrustful, had kept her lover as far from her sister as possible. Perhaps he is still too much alive for her to reveal herself publicly, to show any sign of her distress.

And suddenly: “What a curious relation is mine with Roger at this moment—I who have given him a kind of shape after his death.” The shape of a ghost to carry within and fulfill her: “I feel very much in his presence at the moment; as if I were intimately connected with him; as if we together had given birth to this vision of him: a child born of us.”¹³

That deeply rooted frustration, those vain cries and hopes through the years! Only a phantom to answer them, who doesn’t have the power to refuse that birth, or perhaps the embrace, the union that preceded it. “He had no power to alter it. And yet for some years it will represent him.”¹⁴ As Leonard’s children would have represented him had he not refused them. Or as Clive’s children represent him, born of Vanessa. As this child conceived with Vanessa’s lover represents Roger Fry.

An ongoing obsession, children, now paired with the ever-present obsession of the war, which reawakens in her Septimus’s awareness that “millions lamented; for ages they had sorrowed,” and now they are more real than ever. Obsession with her confinement at Rodmell under bombardment: the planes coming every day, flying so close. Every evening, waiting to hear where the bombs drop. “If it doesn’t kill me its killing someone else,” writes Virginia.¹⁵

When Leonard thinks it’s too risky to cross the garden, they lie flat on their bellies under a tree. “Don’t close yr teeth,” he advises Virginia. Each evening the Nazi planes threaten, but each evening they spend bowling, Virginia’s passion, and she imagines a prosaic and peaceful death mid-game on a lovely summer evening. The planes swoop over the villages; you can see their swastikas. Vita telephones from Sissinghurst, frantic as the bombs drop around her house: “Can you hear that? … Thats another. Thats another.” Virginia listens horrified to the voice of a friend who could be killed while talking to her—pressure, horror, danger, she concludes.¹⁶

Spluttering, whistling, the sound of something like a saw overhead, raids every night, death held in suspense, and for Virginia, the frantic desire to survive:

But worse than the bombs, the past is going to swoop down on her, the past of Hyde Park Gate, inexorable, its path cleared by her disbanded circle of friends, the many missing, sometimes frivolous diversions that kept her occupied or allowed her to channel the memory and sublimate it into her work.

Leonard doesn’t compensate for those absences. On the contrary. They know how to live together, but their lives run parallel and never meet. Privately, they have constructed a kind of mutual, harmonious existence. But Virginia’s character cannot confide in Leonard’s, as she confides in Vanessa, Ethel, many of her other friends. And Leonard cannot confide in anyone since the years in Ceylon.

Each is grounded in an adjacent but self-contained world: “L. saw a grey heraldic bird: I only saw my thoughts.”¹⁸

He is always judging her according to the same criteria. In his eyes, Virginia is continually threatened by madness, a madwoman under reprieve, renowned, a partner he’s used to. He has himself suffered from so many tacit judgments because of his family’s social status, his Judaism.

He remains calm, fairly withdrawn. Even if he writes articles, political essays, gives lectures, participates in antifascist activities, and, as a journalist, holds important positions, even if he still directs the Hogarth Press, he lives at Rodmell for the present and devotes himself mostly to raising his dogs, tending his garden; in his autobiography he proudly remembers one afternoon, as he was planting irises, Virginia called to him from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech,” and in answer he shouted: “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.”¹⁹ And then, noting in his memoir that they are still flowering twenty-one years after Hitler’s suicide, he does not mention the twenty-five years since Virginia’s.

Virginia enjoys periods of remission, like that day “almost too—I wont say happy: but amenable. The tune varies, from one nice melody to another. All is played (today) in such a theatre. Hills & fields; I cant stop looking.” She savors it: “One things ‘pleasant’ after another: breakfast, writing, walking, tea, bowls, reading, sweets, bed…. The globe rounds again. Behind it—oh yes.”²⁰

Already quite despondent in November 1940, she nevertheless writes to Vita: “Look, Vita … You must come here instantly. Not to see me. To see the flood. A bomb burst the Banks. We are so lovely—all sea, up to the gate. I’ve never seen anything more visionary lovely than Caburn upside down in the water.”²¹ She has twenty ideas for books all buzzing around in her head.

At the start of the war, she is not just writing two works, Roger Fry and Between the Acts; as we have seen, she is also working on a third, which will become A Sketch of the Past well after her death. We have seen it open the floodgates for disturbing, devastating memories, allowing us to know Virginia Stephen better. And we have seen Virginia Woolf tormented by her own memory, transcribing the cruelty, placing side by side the reality of the present war with the disasters of a bygone childhood, its destructive griefs, its perverse aftermaths. The personal horror inscribed in the general horror.

Virginia revels in these memories erupting in their terrible freshness; she undoubtedly thinks she can rid herself of them by writing them out. But, once invoked, the ghosts will claim her and won’t let go. In particular, the ghost of her father.

She can’t talk about her family to Leonard, hurt by his wife’s snobbery with regard to the Woolfs and jealous of the endless attention she lavishes on the Bells, their importance to her, which he considers excessive. The two sisters often joked about his occasional reluctance to visit Charleston and his bitterness “imagining,” according to them, Virginia’s preference for the Bells over the Woolfs. Which was hardly “imagined,” and they knew that very well….

At present, Leonard is not, cannot be, aware of what is going to transpire and is content with supervising his wife’s diet and activities, reassured by Rodmell’s isolation and calm, which for her, on the contrary, will prove fatal.

She is still a passionate conversationalist, but encounters and gatherings are rare. There’s a party for Angelica at Charleston, where a meeting of the Memoir Club will take place. There are letters. Virginia receives a long letter from Benedict, or rather from Ben Nicolson, twenty-seven years old, one of Vita’s sons. He criticizes Bloomsbury’s elitism, the importance given to their poets, who should have been political activists and gotten involved. She answers with an even longer letter and remarks:

For a time she works on all three projects at once; one of them will reach the very core of presence, our presence, in a world that remains indifferent to us. “They were all caught and caged; prisoners; watching a spectacle. Nothing happened.”²⁴

She does not “reach” that core: she is there.

It is Between the Acts.

Leonard read the finished manuscript, without reading the signs indicating where Virginia was then, or found herself: on the verge of departure…. But it was already so late, and it’s easy to say this long after the fact, knowing what happened next. Virginia herself was taking delight in writing what she drew from within, neither analyzing nor decoding it. Not writing in the first person no doubt let her extract but also extricate herself from what haunted her, fatally—by distributing it among the characters she created; by making other players act it out, by transcribing it in living signs throughout her pages.

So there is Isa, with an unquenchable desire for water throughout the book, who wonders: “‘What wish should I drop into the well?’ … ‘that the waters should cover me … of the wishing well.’” And there is a pond about which we are told for no reason that “it was in that deep centre, in that black heart, that the lady had drowned herself.” And again, when the time punctually announces itself for Isa: “The church bells always stopped, leaving you to ask: Won’t there be another note? Isa, half-way across the lawn, listened…. Ding, dong, ding…. There was not going to be another note.” And Isa remarks that the show given near her manor by the villagers had drawn a larger crowd than in other years, “but then last year it rained,” and she murmurs: “This year, last year, next year, never,” and repeats it later in the evening.²⁵

Meanwhile, outside, the performance over, the audience mingling, and the actors scattered, Miss LaTrobe, the author, experiences a fleeting moment of fulfillment: “You have taken my gift! Glory possessed her—for one moment … her gift meant nothing. If they had understood her meaning; if they had known their parts…. ‘A failure,’ she groaned.” She leans against a tree and looks at the ground, which is nothing more than ground, not some remarkable territory. “This is death, death, death, death, she noted in the margin of her mind; when illusion fails.”²⁶

And Miss LaTrobe, the creator, the sot, the marginalized lesbian, takes refuge in a bar, its hubbub, the smell of rancid beer. “What she wanted … was the darkness in the mud; a whisky and soda at the pub; and coarse words descending like maggots through the waters.” When she gets her drink, “she raised her glass to her lips. And drank. And listened. Words of one syllable sank down into the mud. She drowsed; she nodded…. Words without meaning—wonderful words.”²⁷

The words for the next performance. Issued from the mud at the bottom of the water.

That fascinating clear or muddy water with its menacing charms, which runs through all the work, the letters, the diary of Virginia. The water that Julia, her mother, “exhausted swimmer,” would never manage to cross. The water that Virginia asks to be left “to go deeper and deeper in” in Moments of Being. Also the water of the great lake of melancholy: “And so I pitched into my great lake of melancholy. Lord how deep it is! … The only way I keep afloat is by working…. Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down. And as usual, I feel that if I sink further I shall reach the truth.” Unless she lets herself slip “tranquilly off into the deep water of my own thoughts navigating the underworld,” or into “some continuous stream, not solely of human thought, but of the ship, the night &c, all flowing together.”²⁸

A never-ending metaphor. In 1931, ten years before drowning herself, she wrote to John Lehmann: “If I live another 50 years I think I shall put this method to some use, but in 50 years I shall be under the pond, with the gold fish swimming over me.” In 1925, she wrote to Gerald Brenan that “one ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.” There are countless examples, forever pointing to the River Ouse.²⁹

But, just as alarming, the mountains are now emerging and with them, the specter of Leslie. Solitude with Leonard, the solitude of Rodmell, authorizes the past to haunt Virginia, without the former safeguard of a dazzling, public, and abundantly full life; of an audience and an array of activities that formed a barrier against certain obsessions.

With no more barriers, the grief of the past descends upon her, in the present; suffering never extinguished nor even wholly realized. The enigma of what “was impossible to say aloud” assails her and remains forever forbidden: the suspicions of incest regarding the father.³⁰ Hyde Park Gate returns, morbid, corrupted. And more immediately, there is the war.

“I plunged into the past this morning; wrote about father.”³¹ She goes through his papers, rereads his books, renews her love for him; but above all, she advances alone into the harrowing account of what she hides within, unleashing the most disturbed, least healthy part of herself, which pours forth in this steadily deteriorating time of war, asphyxiation awaiting her in the garage, or morphine: the suicide planned by Leonard in case of defeat, which she dreads.

“How beautiful they were, those old people—” she marvels, lost in the letters of her parents, which she sees free of “mud” … whereas at the same time she describes the suspect atmosphere surrounding them, evoking or insinuating the ambiguous discomfort, the libidinous cloud around Leslie Stephen, widowed.³²

Throughout the diary, mention of the father, or even of mountains, which symbolize him, often anticipates a depressive episode. Symptoms are usually mentioned within a few pages of such allusions.

At the moment, Leslie is never far away. Remember that she wrote, “[I] turn toward my father,” upon learning of a war-related disaster. On a March day in 1940, trying to overcome her depression, Virginia takes heart, as she often does, in making plans: she will take books around to the bookstores with Leonard; they will have tea, window shop at antique stores; there will be beautiful farms, green lawns; she will bowl, buy a notebook, rearrange the furniture in her room, occasionally make a cake, write a book of prose poetry. “For in Gods name I’ve done my share, with pen & talk, for the human race. I mean young writers can stand on their own feet. Yes, I deserve a spring—I owe nobody nothing.” And as the primary cure she adds, “Now being drowned by the flow of running water, I will read Whymper till lunch time.”³³

Water. But also, going by the name of Whymper, the mountain. Edward Whymper: the first alpinist to scale Mont Cervin (the Matterhorn), a climb that caused a scandal: four members of the roped party, among them Oscar Wilde’s brother, died there, falling into a crevasse. Whymper was suspected of cutting the rope to save his own life. Most importantly, Whymper’s is a world of glaciers, summits, peaks, alpenstocks, guides … and suspicion.

“I plunged into the past,” and for her next book, Virginia thinks of “taking my mountain top—that persistent vision—as a starting point.” Which requires the presence of a ghost, her father.³⁴

Twenty-eight days before her suicide, on the back of a rough draft of Between the Acts, she will write a short sketch: “The Symbol.”³⁵

And the symbol is a mountain.

A woman seated on a hotel balcony … facing the mountain writes: “The mountain is a symbol.” She looks through binoculars at “the virgin height” that the first version (crossed out) describes as “a menace: something cleft in the mind like two parts of a broken disk: two numbers: two numbers that cannot be added: a problem that is insoluble.”³⁶

Today she has the impression of having observed the mountain as she stared at her mother in her death throes, succumbing to cancer, and she recalls having been impatient for her to come to the end of it, wishing her dead in order to be free, to be able to marry. Virginia, beside Leslie, had suffered the same impatience.

But the mountain, complains the woman, the mountain “never moves … it would need an earthquake to destroy that mountain.” Since the symbol mountain can’t be removed, this woman, this girl, in “the most absurd dreams,” aspires to climb it, no doubt reaching its summit: “If I could get there, I should be happy to die. I think there, in the crater … I should find the answer.” The peak. The crater. The cavity. The mountain also contains a place to pitch oneself, like the “great lake of melancholy”—to reach the truth, or because of course there is none.³⁷

Virginia has already wondered “if shadows could die, and how one buried them.”³⁸ But, like the mountain once hidden by clouds, they are not gone. They are there, all around. Leslie, and Stella, and Thoby avoiding saying Stella’s name after her death, Stella, the name of a ship that had just sunk; and Thoby dead, and Virginia and Adrian deciding together to repeat his name often; and the elusive Julia, her corpse and Dr. Seton and Jack Hill and St. Ives, and … Laura, and even Roger, now surround Virginia Woolf, who yields to them and staggers, spellbound.

Leonard doesn’t see her succumb, alone, adrift; he doesn’t see her letting herself be sucked in by the lines she draws. For him, it’s normal to find her scrubbing floors to ease her anxiety. He doesn’t see her languish, isolated with him, cut off from her circle. On the contrary, he insists on maintaining the calm and isolation forced upon them by the war.

It was Leonard, the pillar, the rock, who proposed, if necessary, their joint suicide. “All the walls, the protecting & reflecting walls, wear so terribly thin in this war.”³⁹

He doesn’t see her, only watches over her, holding to his old theories; the liturgical glass of milk remains a part of their routine. She has no support. Leonard pursues the life that she made possible for him, that he’s good at, that fulfills him, and that he has pursued faithfully at her side, at a propitious distance until now. But now he no longer sees her, seems tired of her.

And then … and then … Virginia Woolf’s prestige no longer protects her, without the publicity, without the audience, or at least the perceived audience, she had before. It has dispersed, the circle that allowed the brilliant woman to sparkle (under Leonard’s reproving but impressed gaze) and to assert herself, to command everyone’s respect, safeguarded by them. The rampart of the public, of Bloomsbury, has disappeared. She is alone with her husband and seems to blur in his eyes. In a sense, she is mastered; no more escapades at Ottoline Morrell’s or other thrilling scenes, no more circle of friends who heighten her successes. Who keep her in focus.

More than anyone else, Leonard recognizes the value of the work. But for him it’s the product of his wife’s “genius,” and since he links genius to madness, that work doesn’t protect her.

The unthinkable: in January 1941, Harper’s Bazaar returns to Virginia Woolf a short story they had commissioned from her. Rejected. “A battle against depression, rejection (by Harper’s of my story & Ellen Terry) routed today (I hope) by clearing out kitchen; by sending an article (a lame one) to N.S. [New Statesman]: & by breaking into PH⁴⁰ 2 days, I think, of memoir writing. This trough of despair shall not, I swear, engulf me. The solitude is great.” And even now, words she will repeat to Leonard in three months’ time: “We live without a future … our noses pressed to a closed door.”⁴¹

The solitude is great….

A visit to Cambridge in February slightly relieves the despondency, the pervasive sadness. “[It] felt as if we’d had a hot bath—it was so clean warm and civilised.” Virginia is ecstatic, and that speaks volumes about what Rodmell has become for her. She thanks one of her hosts for the “extraordinarily happy evening you gave us…. It remains like an oasis, last Wednesday, not a mirage—in the desert.”⁴²

Returning to that “desert,” she loses her footing again. As the months go by, her distress becomes increasingly perceptible, the isolation desolate. Around others, she bears up well, her gaiety restored for those ever rarer encounters or in her letters, as when she thanks Vita for her gift of butter, then so precious: “Please congratulate the cows from me, and the dairy maid, and I would like to suggest that the calf should be known in the future (if it’s a man) as Leonard if a woman as Virginia.”⁴³

She continues to write to Ethel Smyth, at length, confiding in her as never before. March 1, 1941—by March 28 Virginia Woolf will be dead: “Do you feel, as I do, when my head’s not this impossible grindstone, that this is the worst stage of the war? I do. I was saying to Leonard, we have no future. He says that’s what gives him hope. He says the necessity of some catastrophe pricks him up.”⁴⁴

Difficult to follow the exchange. But where does Leonard’s response come from? Why this hope in the absence of a future, a future Virginia refutes? What is the “necessary catastrophe” that seems inevitable—and exciting—to him? Is he just expressing his attitude toward the war, or has something unconscious escaped here?

In four weeks’ time, Virginia will drown herself.

Octavia Wilberforce, a doctor, a pioneer in that profession in her youth. A former suffragette. Some sort of distant cousin to Virginia. The lover of an old actress, Elizabeth Robins, who remembered a “vicious” Julia and lived for some time in the United States.⁴⁵ Octavia has a practice at Brighton, where she attends Virginia.

A decent enough woman, Octavia Wilberforce. Leon Edel, who knew her a bit later, describes her as “robust and round-faced”; “literature was obviously a mystery to her.” She occupied herself with medicine and animal husbandry. The last time he saw her, “she sat on her little tractor and meandered triumphantly through the pastures, ruling her bovine empire and wearing her little crown of artificial flowers on her off-the-face hat.”⁴⁶

But Virginia, so alone now, throws herself upon her, a woman six years her junior who treats her almost like a child. A pathetic, emaciated Virginia. An Octavia petrified by the great writer to whom Elizabeth Robins has already introduced her, terrified of not being equal to the task, although at each visit, Virginia begs her to stay.

An Octavia Wilberforce who, like Leonard, provides milk! Her power over the couple: each week when she comes for tea, she brings them milk and cream from her cows. Virginia soon nicknames her “leech Octavia,” but she’s the one who begs for the leech’s presence. “I rather think I’ve a new lover,” she writes in fun to Ethel and especially to Vita, “a doctor, a Wilberforce, a cousin.” Above all, someone to hang onto.⁴⁷

She hardly mentions her in her diary or elsewhere in her letters; she writes a few letters to Octavia, and the opening of one of them is inauspicious: “You’ve reduced me not to silence quite, but to a kind of splutter.”⁴⁸ With gratitude this time for the products of the Devonshire cows. Octavia then proposes a trade: for the milk, a book.

A book in exchange for milk. Milk, forever the obstacle in Virginia’s path.

Milk, even Devonshire milk, is hardly fair trade for a book, Octavia continues, albeit unconvinced. And Virginia: “I never heard of a more absurd ‘business proposition’ as you call it. A month’s milk and cream in return for an unborn and as far as I can tell completely worthless book.” And this cry: “I’ve lost all power over words, cant do a thing with them.” Which she doesn’t write anywhere else, and which is inaccurate. But the injury, the terror are not.⁴⁹

She proposes apples instead of a book and goes on: “I cant, as you see, make my hand cease to tremble.”⁵⁰ Her hands at present are always icy, stalactites, says Octavia, who sometimes takes them into her own while she repeats idiotic theories comparing mental suffering to appendicitis.

And it is Virginia’s right hand that trembles continuously now, like Leonard’s.

Virginia lets herself go a little around this woman whom she dominates, who doesn’t not really count, but serves as a lifeline—and who is tortured by her inability to help the writer for whom Devonshire milk, she confesses, doesn’t seem to do much good. “Don’t go yet,” is Virginia’s refrain, who insists: “You don’t know how much I need it.”⁵¹

Leonard sometimes takes tea with them and returns to his work, despite his wife’s attempts to retain him as well. Alone with Octavia, Virginia can then speak of Leslie, whose love letters to his wife she is classifying, enraptured. “Poor Leonard is tired out by my interest in my family and all it brings back.” And Wilberforce listens as she spills the thousand versions of that fixation with a father who, Virginia repeats to her, leaned too heavily on his children at the death of their mother, demanded too much emotionally from them, ruined her life and, she says, deadened her physical responses. She reevaluates what she wrote elsewhere. Octavia understands what she can of it, strangely convinced that George Duckworth was evidently adored by his half-sister. “Did you know him?” she asks Elizabeth Robins.⁵²

Virginia Woolf is at her wit’s end, jumpy, thin as “a razor,” with no one to turn to but this powerless woman who listens to her, rarely understands her, and despairs at not being able to “save” her.⁵³

She feels useless. The village doesn’t even want her for night watches during air raids, though they asked Leonard. She can no longer work for long stretches, never after tea. When she is too desperate, she goes to the kitchen to make cakes.

Miss Robins is able to start writing again thanks to a letter from Virginia. She cables Octavia, “Virginia’s letter sets me to work again.” Delighted to hear the news, Virginia asks Octavia excitedly to “Say it again!” And when Octavia obeys: “Yes, but tell me again the exact words.”⁵⁴

Octavia’s last visit, March 21, and Virginia, as always: “Don’t go yet,” and Octavia torn, because a patient is waiting. Virginia asks her if she can give her something to do…. Catalogue her library? Flattered, considering it sufficient to “buck up” Virginia, Wilberforce repeats her refrain: “there’s nobody in England I’d like, adore more to help.” Which sounds laughable … but she is the only one who can say that.⁵⁵

Leonard worries about his wife much less now than he did before, when she was doing fine. Now he no longer notices her. Nothing in Virginia’s behavior corresponds to the list of red flags he has established, calls for “tak[ing] steps” he considers panaceas: drinking milk, eating better, getting more sleep, insignificant remedies amounting to superstitions.⁵⁶

As always, he justifies himself in his memoir: he began to worry toward the end of January; Virginia was doing better until then. Her depression stemmed from completing Between the Acts: the fatigue, having cut “the umbilical cord” and sent the manuscript to the printer.⁵⁷ The breakdown occurred suddenly, without warning, according to him.

She has hung on for months. Now she starts losing ground. During the first half of March, Virginia returns from a walk soaked, distraught; she claims to have slipped in a stream. No doubt a first attempt. But no one to rally around her. Leonard, terrified, seems to withdraw still further. Wilberforce is upset, of course, but mainly because the writer’s fame intimidates her and she’s afraid of making a bad impression. The others have dispersed. Virginia struggles alone.

Alone? Not completely. Vanessa pays her a visit on March 20; upset, genuinely worried, she writes to her immediately upon returning to Charleston. A lethal letter. Which could have arisen instinctively from the old dispute, now closed. Or from stupidity.

With this letter she would have the last word. In it we can also hear how the one who falters is discredited. “Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you.”⁵⁸

Vanessa: “You must be sensible. Which means you must accept the fact that Leonard and I can judge better than you can…. You’re in the state when one never admits what’s the matter—but you must not go and get ill just now. What shall we do when we’re invaded if you are a helpless invalid—”⁵⁹ The death blow.

She adds that both she and Leonard (as opposed, that is, to Virginia) have always had reputations for good sense and honesty. So her sister must “believe in” them.⁶⁰

But what is there to believe in, which she is rejecting? Leonard has nothing to offer. He is always talking of “tak[ing] steps,” but goes in circles, not knowing what those measures are.⁶¹ In any case, it’s too late now, but he never considered asking Virginia, talking to her, listening to her. For him, his wife’s difficulties are physical in nature, and he considers her to inhabit a different sphere from his when she becomes sick. There’s no question of exchange or understanding, only of authority. He digs in his heels, alone, powerless, clueless, superior, dominant: Virginia’s only chance, he insists, is to yield.

Yield to what? He must convince her that she’s very sick. Increase her anxiety about her condition, terrify her. Corner her. And make her drink milk.

On February 25, she accompanied him to Brighton again, where he was giving a talk. In the restroom at the Sussex Grill, “p—ing as quietly as I could,” she listens to the women chatting as they powder their faces, and a short story takes shape, the last one after the mountain-symbol story, this time about a coastal town that reeks of fish, even in the restrooms.⁶²

In a Brighton bakery, she observes, horrified, a fat woman with her “large white muffin face,” heavily made-up old women stuffing themselves: “something scented, shoddy, parasitic about them. Then they toted up cakes…. Where does the money come from to feed these fat white slugs? Brighton a love corner for slugs.” And then in Rodmell, “infernal boredom.”⁶³

The journal is silent until March 8, and then Brighton again, “shell encrusted old women, rouged, decked, cadaverous at the tea shop,” and then immediately a jump; Virginia Woolf defends herself: “No: I intend no introspection. I mark Henry James’s sentence: Observe perpetually. Observe the oncome of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable. Or I hope so. I insist upon spending this time to the best advantage. I will go down with my colours flying.”⁶⁴

A final entry in the diary, March 24, four days before going down. She observed much, with great care, and begins: “She had a nose like the Duke of Wellington & great horse teeth & cold prominent eyes. When we came in she was sitting perched on a 3 cornered chair with knitting in her hands. An arrow fastened her collar … two of her sons had been killed in the war. This, one felt, was to her credit…. I tried to coin a few compliments. But they perished in the icy sea between us. And then there was nothing.”⁶⁵

Nevertheless, a few more lines: “This windy corner. And Nessa is at Brighton, & I am imagining how it wd be if we could infuse souls.”⁶⁶

She makes dates for April with Tom Eliot, Ethel Smyth; writes to Vita, whose parakeets are dying in great numbers: “If we come over [to Sissinghurst], may I bring her [Louie, the housekeeper] a pair if any survive? Do they die all in an instant? When shall we come? Lord knows—”⁶⁷

She writes to John Lehmann. He has just read the manuscript of Between the Acts, to mediate between Leonard, who is enthusiastic, and Virginia, who no longer believes in it. He sides passionately with Leonard. They decide on its publication, but Virginia protests: “Dear John, I’d decided, before your letter came, that I cant publish that novel as it stands—its too silly and trivial.” She plans to revise it, to see if she can make something of it; she had not realized that it was so bad. And she humbly apologizes, apologizes again “profoundly” to John Lehmann.⁶⁸

So many mental, physical, cerebral, technical “acts” required by her work over so long a time … she had come so far, she was exhausted. And all that time having also borne the burden of living, just existence itself.

There is no writer, no authentic thinker, who is not burdened with bitter knowledge: the eternally unknown language of the world in which we are the actors in our own disappearances.

Virginia Woolf had acquired yet another kind of knowledge: the ability to capture what whispers within the silence. There’s great danger in saying, even through old Lucy Swithin, that “we haven’t the words—we haven’t the words.”⁶⁹

And on March 27 Leonard is more frightened than ever, finding “the terrifying decision which I had to take then once more faced me. It was essential for her to resign herself to illness and the drastic regime which alone could stave off insanity.” That tedious regime: milk, food, sleep! But above all, “I had to urge her to face the verge of disaster in order to get her to accept the misery of the only method of avoiding it.” Her only chance, once again, is to yield.⁷⁰

Urgently he turns to Octavia Wilberforce, who—although there’s no proof of her competence, especially in this area—impresses him just as George Duckworth once did. “A remarkable character. Her ancestors were the famous Wilberforces of the anti-slavery movement; their portraits hung on her walls…. She was large, strong, solid, slow growing, completely reliable, like an English oak. Her roots were in English history and the English soil of Sussex.”⁷¹ What better proof!

She is also a timid woman, not very intelligent; an unassertive, compliant doctor.

She is in bed, very sick with the flu and a bad fever, and the telephone rings: Leonard, in a panic, is calling for her help. She is too sick, can’t come; he begs her to see them. He adds that Virginia doesn’t want to see her. Later he will write that together they had agreed upon this visit.

The women spoke together, he writes, had a conversation. No. He gave Wilberforce control; she accepted and suddenly took herself very seriously. Here is Virginia, Virginia Woolf, dragged against her will to an incompetent doctor, humiliated before the woman who had supported her, who had been proud to know her; she sees herself at Octavia’s mercy. And she is. Quite pleased with herself, Octavia Wilberforce plays doctor. She forgets her cough: a battle is under way, “a battle of—not wits but minds,” she dares to call it.⁷²

That great mind is indignant. Virginia Woolf seems to resist her questions: “[she] wouldn’t answer my questions frankly … and was generally resistive.” So Wilberforce treats her as though she were lying, or at least “gently and firmly [I] told her that I knew her answer wasn’t true”; whatever the true answer is, she thinks Virginia Woolf is withholding it.

She orders her to undress, which serves no purpose in this instance. As though “sleep-walking,” Virginia obeys, then stops and asks Octavia to promise not to order her a rest cure. Octavia answers evasively and the examination continues. Virginia resists at each step, “like a petulant child.”⁷³

“God knows if I did her a penn’orth of good,” confesses the stupid Octavia to Elizabeth. She took Virginia’s ice-cold hands in her own, reaffirmed that, in all of England, Virginia was the person she’d like most to help, but Virginia must “collaborate.” “All you have to do is to reassure Leonard,” she concludes. Whom she joins in the next room, leaving Virginia alone to wait while they discuss her.⁷⁴

This is Virginia Woolf, the writer. She is not allowed to speak. Papa, Mama are taking charge of her. “Once you fall….”⁷⁵

While she is waiting docilely in her corner, a plane rumbles over, a loud din above the roof; bombs explode nearby. Absorbed in their conversation, Wilberforce and Leonard take no notice. It’s only on the drive home that Leonard will remember and make note of it. But Virginia, left alone, offended, waiting by herself while bombs are dropping? Laboriously, Wilberforce arrives at “her” prescription: Virginia is not to work for a certain amount of time, Virginia consumes too many books. Rationed, she will be fine.

Leonard is satisfied. Returning home with Virginia, he hopes that the words of Wilberforce, “the oak,” have had some effect on her.⁷⁶

They have. The next day she will drown herself.

The last person to see her is Louie Maier, the housekeeper.

The morning of March 28, Leonard brings her Virginia, who is not doing well: “‘Louie, will you give Mrs Woolf a duster so that she can help you clean the room?’ I gave her a duster, but it seemed very strange. I had never known her want to do any housework with me before.”⁷⁷

And Louie taught the writer, terrified by the idea of no longer being able to write books, how to clean them. (I watched her repeat that epic lesson for a film. Majestically, slowly and solemnly, she opened, shook out, flapped and closed each volume.) “After a while Mrs Woolf put the duster down and went away. I thought that probably she did not like cleaning the study and had decided to do something else.”⁷⁸ Yes, exactly.

To get from Monk’s House to the River Ouse, you must first cross through a romantic, lopsided cemetery adjacent to the garden. Then comes a long path leading through a bare, very flat landscape offering no reference points or recourse. You must be very determined, as Virginia was. Forget Ophelia with her wreath of flowers, even if she too was led “from her melodious lay/to muddy death.”⁷⁹ There’s nothing pastoral about the River Ouse; it runs through an industrial district. It’s a setting out of Zola, where the desperate come from the surrounded villages to commit suicide.

Virginia left three letters. One to Vanessa, thanking her for hers! Two testimonials for Leonard, written a few days apart. One of them prior to her first attempt, perhaps. She confirms that she’s hearing voices again, that she’s afraid of being mad forever and that he has been perfect for her. She repeats what Rachel says to her fiancé in The Voyage Out, even though they obviously never managed to love each other: “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.” Leonard will be better without her: “I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work.” He has been so patient with her, done all that could be done. And she adds each time … “everybody knows it.”⁸⁰

What was Virginia Woolf denied? Respect.

As were Vincent Van Gogh and Antonin Artaud, Gérard de Nerval and Giordano Bruno, Friedrich Nietzsche and Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire as well, so many others, Camille Claudel…. Many of them, judging themselves through the eyes of others, found themselves guilty and took their own lives.

They remain, “colours flying.”⁸¹

A few months before sinking into the River Ouse, her pockets weighted with stones, Virginia Woolf wrote: “All frost. Still frost. Burning white…. What is that phrase I always remember—or forget. Look your last on all things lovely.”⁸²