II
A FEW DAYS after Leslie’s cremation they went to Manorbier in south Wales, and Violet Dickinson joined them there. It was empty country, between moor and sea, and Virginia walked alone along the cliffs, meditating on her future. In 1922 she recorded in her diary that it was during these walks that the vision of what she wanted to write focused clearly in her mind, but at the time she made no mention of it in her letters, which dwelt, as so often when a parent dies, on what more she should have done for her father, and her regret that he never knew how much she loved him. Vanessa was harsher. Many years later she confided to her son that Leslie’s death had come as a relief. “It was impossible not to be glad,” she said. “He had been ill for so long, and we had for so long been expecting it, and it was of course in many ways convenient,” by which she meant that the four of them could escape from the Duckworths and the stuffy gentility of Hyde Park Gate. They would find a house for themselves, if possible in Bloomsbury.
Before taking this important step in their lives, the four of them, as if in need of a further purging of the past, went to Italy. It was Virginia’s first visit abroad apart from a childhood jaunt to Boulogne, but the holiday was not well managed. Nobody had bothered to book rooms in Venice, and their first gondola trips were in search of lodgings, and when they found them, they were so cramped that they were obliged to move into an expensive hotel which they could ill afford. Only then could Virginia “wander about open-mouthed,” but she was never an avid sightseer, preferring people and pictures to palaces and churches. The party continued to Florence, where they met English friends and were pestered by begging children. Virginia did not think well of the Italians, of whose language she could not speak a word. She thought the country beautiful but its people degenerate. “Thank God,” she wrote to Emma Vaughan, “that I was born an Englishwoman.” All her life she remained a partial xenophobe.
In Paris, on their way home, they were more fortunate. They found Clive Bell, whom Virginia had met once before in Thoby’s rooms at Cambridge, and he took them to visit Auguste Rodin in his studio. Clive was the first non-Duckworth man in Virginia’s life, and she loved him for his joviality, intellectual adventurousness and a constant undercurrent of flirtatiousness. She was half amused, half scared, and their friendship would have developed rapidly had she not succumbed, on the day after their return from Paris, to a severe mental breakdown.
“All that summer she was mad,” wrote Quentin Bell, and his words were borrowed in 1981 for the title of a book by Dr. Stephen Trombley which set out to prove them unjustified. She was not mad in the technical sense, nor even manic-depressive, the looser term often employed by people unqualified to make a judgment. Dr. Trombley proposed a more scientific diagnosis: “She suffered from a complex somatic reaction to a series of difficult personal situations.” But “mad” was the word employed by Virginia’s family and by herself, in faint derision of her condition, because they knew that it would pass, and once passed, her mind would be clarified by it, as a storm clarifies the sky. “The insane view of life has much to be said for it,” she told Emma Vaughan, meaning that imagination is let loose, and some of her best ideas came to her when she was in no fit state to record them. But at the time, it was no joke to her family and friends. Once before, following the death of her mother, Virginia had acted very strangely, fainting without reason, blushing when spoken to, and subject to bouts of insomnia and headache, but this second attack, in May-August 1904, was more serious. She refused to eat. She insulted her closest friends. The birds were talking Greek, and Edward VII was yelling obscenities in the shrubbery. Like Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway she threw herself from a window in attempted suicide, but it failed because the window was too close to the ground. All this time she was staying with Violet Dickinson in Hertfordshire, under the care of three nurses and the eminent nerve specialist George Savage, who had little idea how to treat her dementia or its cause. If this was not madness, it was something akin to it. “The Goat’s mad,” her siblings would remark cheerfully, using her childhood nickname. They were not unsympathetic, but busy in arranging the move from Hyde Park Gate to Bloomsbury.
When Virginia recovered, she spent some weeks at Cambridge with her Quaker aunt, Emelia Stephen, who bored her with trivial chatter and tedious benignity, and she busied herself by helping Frederic Maitland with his life of Leslie Stephen, to which she contributed a passage about Leslie as a father. Then, as a further instalment of the convalescence planned for her, she was sent to stay in Yorkshire with her cousin William Vaughan, headmaster of Giggleswick School, and his wife Madge. Life in a headmaster’s house was no rest-cure. She was involved in constant meetings with other masters, tea parties with their wives, and compulsory attendance at chapel. She pitied Madge, a woman of stature and literary ambitions, now condemned to intellectual penury. Virginia was well looked after. She was given a large well-windowed bedroom, in which I once spent a night as the guest of a later headmaster, and she could escape from the school to wander on the moors.
Giggleswick also gave her the chance to resume her writing, and for the first time to publish what she wrote. She turned from private journal keeping to journalism. Violet had introduced her to Mrs. Arthur Lyttelton, editor of the Women’s Supplement to The Guardian, an Anglo-Catholic clerical weekly, and Virginia begged her for work. Her first essay to be published was a description of her visit to Haworth Parsonage, the Brontës’ old house. “There is a knack of writing for newspapers which has to be learnt, and is quite independent of literary merits,” she told Violet with the temerity of a first-time journalist. She needed the money after the heavy expenses of her three-month illness, and she invited criticism from her friends, by which she meant praise. Quite soon her gratitude to Margaret Lyttelton changed to indignation that her copy was subjected to minor cuts and alterations. The Guardian, which was intended for nuns and clerics, was an absurd medium for a young writer bursting with new ideas. But it was a start. Before long she was invited to contribute reviews to the more prestigious Times Literary Supplement and The National Review.
Virginia was not the solitary, secretive writer that she later became, hugging her conception to herself like a mother her unborn child. Always relating fact to fancy, she began to define character by body language, clothes and tone of voice, and landscape by the centuries of toil that had created it. Her letters matched her youthful exuberance. When she returned on holiday to Giggleswick, but this time staying in lodgings, liberated from the routines of school life, she wrote to Violet: “You can imagine that I never wash, or do my hair, but stride with gigantic strides over the wild moorside, shouting Odes of Pindar, as I leap from crag to crag, and exulting in the air which buffets me and caresses me, like a stern but affectionate parent. That is Stephen Brontëised.” Sometimes in writing to Madge Vaughan, who at that period was her literary confidante, she experimented in fumbling terms with a new view of literature, “a vague and dreamlike world, without love, or heart, or passion, or sex. . . . For though they are dreams to you, and I can’t express them at all adequately, these things are perfectly real to me.” She might have been defining The Waves.
The Stephen family held together for two years after Leslie’s death, years that Virginia described as “a burst of splendour.” Vanessa organized the move to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, George Duckworth conveniently married, and his brother Gerald became a publisher, drifting apart from them, so that the Stephens were free to lead their lives untrammeled and unsupervised. They could dress as they wished, eat when and how they wanted, and felt no need to retain friendships imposed on them in their adolescence. Vanessa later wrote, “It was as if one had stepped suddenly into daylight from darkness.” But their elders saw it as the opposite. Even Henry James was shocked by their disavowal of conventional etiquette. Virginia exulted that at one stroke they abolished the napkin as a symbol of correctness. But there were limits. Vanessa was still addressing Clive, the most intimate of her friends, as “Dear Mr. Bell.”
Bloomsbury itself was symptomatic of their quiet rebelliousness. It was a district of London that in spite of the elegance of its Georgian squares was considered by Kensington to be faintly decadent, the resort of raffish divorcées and indolent students, loose in its morals and behavior. The Stephens’ circumstances matched their income. Leslie Stephen had left property valued at about £15,000, a substantial sum, equivalent to about £350,000 today, and the freehold of Hyde Park Gate, which they chose to lease, not sell; and while neither Thoby nor Adrian earned any money, their sisters were already professionals, Vanessa as a painter (her first paid commission was a portrait of Lady Robert Cecil), and Virginia as a journalist. They could afford to employ two servants, and to take holidays together or separately. Virginia and Adrian went by sea to Portugal and Spain, and all four spent two months in Cornwall and two more in a rented house in Norfolk. But it was London that established the pattern of their lives.
First Virginia engaged herself to teach in Morley College in south London, where the poor were offered education after school age. Her decision was a strange one, possibly inspired by lingering Victorian guilt toward people born without middle-class advantages, or maybe simply from curiosity about other people’s lives. For two years she stuck doggedly to this task, teaching English composition, history and literature to classes that could number as few as two students. She was touched by their enthusiasm, but it often waned under pressure, for she started from an utterly different base, and although she tried to simplify her lectures, writing them out beforehand, her audience was apt to dwindle or miss the point. Once, when she had been talking about the Italian Renaissance, the only question was, “Please, Miss, did the beds in Venice have fleas?”
More important was the slow gathering of like-minded young people at Gordon Square, again on Vanessa’s initiative, and the guests, all in their midtwenties, were mostly Thoby’s friends from Cambridge. She formed two weekly soirées, Thursday Evenings and the Friday Club, the latter mainly devoted to the discussion of the arts, but the company on both occasions was interchangeable, apart from Vanessa’s girlfriends from the Slade. Among the regular attenders were Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Walter Lamb and Desmond MacCarthy, and a little later, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry and Leonard Woolf, but Leonard for only a single evening before he left to govern part of Ceylon as a colonial civil servant. He was to remain there for seven years.
They were a serious group of young men, and their symposiums in Bloomsbury were at first extensions of their seminars at Cambridge. They read papers to each other and discussed abstract ideas like truth and beauty, fueled by nothing more than cocoa and a tot of whiskey, which was all they could afford. The difference from Cambridge was the presence of the two girls. At the university no girls had been admitted to their society, for although they were known to exist in colleges in the outer suburbs, they were regarded in the same way that monks might regard nuns, unavailable and therefore undesirable. In consequence most of them were homosexual, but not irremediably. Now they were confronted by two young women who not only matched them in intelligence but, as Leonard recalled, were astonishingly beautiful. He later wrote, “It was almost impossible for a young man not to fall in love with them.” But for the moment, only Clive Bell, the least solemn of the group, dared express his admiration. He proposed to Vanessa, and was refused.
They were dedicated, as Quentin Bell has described, “to a new honesty and a new charity in personal relations,” but one must not imagine that their conversation was always scintillating. Virginia was often in despair at her failure to strike a spark. Though at that stage of her life she was both eager and reserved, like Rachel Vinrace in The Voyage Out, she did not take immediately to Thoby’s friends. Duncan Grant remembered that she was a little aloof, never addressing the company at large, only individuals. Even that could be tough going. When Sydney-Turner and Strachey joined them for a few days in Cornwall in September 1905, she wrote to Violet: “They are a great trial. They sit silent, absolutely silent, all the time; occasionally they escape to a corner and chuckle over a Latin joke. Perhaps they are falling in love with Nessa; who knows? It would be a silent and very learned process. However, I don’t think they are robust enough to feel very much. Oh, women are my line, and not these inanimate creatures.” She was exaggerating. If these parties were truly so melancholy, she would not have repeated them year after year. These “inanimate creatures” were to become her most intimate friends and shared with her the “burst of splendour” that followed her escape from Kensington. But apart from Clive they seemed to lack her vitality. There was no Byron or Trelawny among them. They were embarrassed by their friend’s sisters. It was not until they came to discard their Cambridge asceticism that their company was enjoyable. Even Leonard struck Virginia at their first meeting as “a violent, trembling, misanthropic Jew.” She remained devoted to her few women friends, and only once did she consent to attend a party in the smart world that she had renounced. “I went to a dance last night,” she told Violet, “and found a dim corner where I sat and read In Memoriam, while Nessa danced every dance till 2:30.” Vanessa, who was to become the more exclusive and reclusive of the sisters, was now the more audacious. “She has volcanoes under her sedate manner,” Virginia wrote about her, and to her, “You are the most complete human being of us all.”
In September 1906 the quartet went to Greece, and then onward to Turkey. It was the only holiday that Virginia took outside Europe, and had it not been that illness spoiled its last stages, it was for her an unforgettable experience. Drenched in classical history and literature (she carried the Odyssey in her handbag), her only regret was that the fifth century B.C. was succeeded by civilizations that could not match it for originality and zest, and she cared little for their monuments.
She and Vanessa, with Violet Dickinson, traveled by train through France and Italy, and by sea from Brindisi to Patras, from where it was but a short step to the classic site of Olympia. There they were joined by Thoby and Adrian, who had sailed down the Dalmatian coast and rode horseback through Montenegro. Their reunion was followed by visits to Corinth and Nauplia. At Mycenae they stayed in the inn named after Helen of Troy, where thirty years later I found their signatures in the visitors’ book. Virginia kept a careful journal of their travels, which was edited in 1990 by Mitchell Leaska. Her description of Mycenae contains the sentence, “I conceived that here was a single spot of intense and brilliantly painted life, girt in by great wastes of desert land.” She was never a guidebook addict: she wrote her own. As Leaska commented, “Something new and different was finding its way into her style. . . . Her imagery was becoming more impressionistic, ambiguous, and therefore more resonant, in sound and meaning,” a quality that was to distinguish all her writing.
At Athens Vanessa fell ill, and was cared for by Violet while the others visited friends in Euboea. She recovered sufficiently to continue to Constantinople with all of them except Thoby, who returned to London. Virginia was impressed by the Turks. Religion was a natural part of their daily lives: they could turn to their devotions as easily as to their ledgers. Many of the women walked without covering their faces, and she wondered why it had ever been necessary to hide the face “of a benevolent spinster, with gold rims to her spectacles, trotting out to buy a fowl for dinner. What danger has she got to hide from?”
Vanessa was still unwell, and they thought it would be wiser to cut short their holiday and travel home by the Orient Express. At Dover, Violet, too, was taken ill, and they were met by the news that Thoby was in bed with a high fever. They had succumbed to what was at first assumed by the doctors to be malaria, but was then diagnosed as acute typhoid. Thoby and Violet lay scarcely a mile apart, desperately ill. She recovered, but Thoby died on November 20, 1906, aged twenty-six.
His death was shocking to his friends. He was in the prime of life, handsome, attractive, vivacious. He was Virginia’s idolized brother. She had loved him as a schoolboy, worshipped him as an undergraduate. Adrian was no substitute. His daughter later admitted, “The wrong brother died,” and though Virginia and Vanessa never said this, they felt it. Adrian was a good, clever, affectionate man, but Virginia still thought of him as a “poor little boy” when he was aged twenty-three and 6 ft. 5 in. tall. She felt Thoby’s death so acutely that she concealed it for nearly a month from Violet, even inventing bulletins of his recovery long after he had died, in case the shock should kill her too. She reserved the expression of her grief for Jacob’s Room, where Jacob is a recognizable portrait of Thoby, and his journey through Greece was almost mile by mile the one they had taken together.
Then, in scarcely less dramatic circumstances, Virginia lost her sister too. Two days after Thoby’s death (“indecently soon,” Virginia felt), Clive Bell proposed to Vanessa a second time, and she accepted him. He was Thoby’s closest friend, in some ways his alter ego, but Vanessa was not in love with him, merely grateful for his kindness to her during Thoby’s illness, and happy that he loved art and possessed the gift of making other people happy. Both were highly sensual. I remember a discussion at a man’s dining club about the most important discoveries of the twentieth century. Some people nominated the telephone, the airplane, the radio. “What do you think, Clive?” one of us asked. “The most important discovery of the century,” he replied, “is that women like it too.”
Clive took his fiancée—the word seemed ludicrous to them, but there was no other—to meet his parents in their house in Wiltshire, and foolishly invited Virginia to join them. While Vanessa was obliged to express some pleasure in the visit, Virginia was under no such obligation, and all her contempt for middle-class respectability spilled into her letter to Violet Dickinson: “The thickness of this nib and the luxury of this paper will show you that I am in a rich and illiterate house, set in its own grounds, gothic, barbaric. I dip my pen into the hoof an old hunter.” Clive’s mother was a “little rabbit-faced woman, with wisps of white hair,” his father “an obvious country gentleman,” and their daughters “exactly what one would have guessed. They play hockey and beagle, and laugh at Adrian’s jokes and come down to dinner in pale blue satin with satin bows in their hair.” She found it difficult to believe that Clive had remained unaffected by this background. She pitied her sister.
This was a very temporary phase of jealousy, for soon after Vanessa’s marriage in February 1907, Virginia found in Clive a correspondent in whom she could confide and a friend who shared her dislike of domesticity which the birth of her son Julian forced on Vanessa. Virginia could tolerate children for short periods, but fled from babies. “I doubt that I shall ever have a baby,” she wrote to Violet from Cornwall, where she, the baby and its parents were on holiday. “Its voice is too terrible, a senseless scream like an ill-omened cat. Nobody could pretend that it was a human being.” Clive refused to cuddle it. It leaked unpleasantly from every orifice. So Clive and Virginia were thrown together by this infant, and they found in each other an escape. Quentin Bell, Vanessa’s second son, has called it more than a flirtation. He claimed that Virginia’s motive was “to break down that charmed circle within which Vanessa and Clive were so happy, and by which she was so cruelly excluded.” Her behavior, like Clive’s, was inexcusable. She set out to detach her sister from him, while he by his response to her showed how shallow was his love for Vanessa. Frances Spalding, Vanessa’s biographer, has summed up the affair (Virginia’s own term for it) as “more a game of wits than a matter of passion, but this did not lessen the outrage.” Virginia soon came to regret her treachery, and for the rest of her life treated her sister with loving caution, to which Vanessa, the stronger character of the two, did not always respond. Clive, on the other hand, showed no symptom of remorse, and his relations with Virginia were undamaged. She found him the most sympathetic and intelligent of all those whom she consulted on the topic that meant most to her, her writing. Indeed he was the only person to whom she ever showed a book in draft, her first, Melymbrosia, which she began to write in 1907 and published eight years later under the title The Voyage Out.
The original Hyde Park Gate family of ten was now reduced to two, Virginia and Adrian. Julia, Stella, Leslie and Thoby were dead, George and Vanessa married, Gerald a publisher, Laura locked up mad. As it was clearly impossible for Virginia and Adrian to share Gordon Square with their married sister, they searched Bloomsbury for another house, and eventually found 29 Fitzroy Square, only a few blocks away, thus initiating those moves from square to square that continued throughout the next three decades, like a game of chess, but never overstepping the boundaries of the board that was Bloomsbury.
Having established themselves so agreeably, Virginia and her brother were continually traveling. Fundamentally she was an urban woman: she needed the society of friends, and ready access to libraries, picture galleries, theatres and concert halls. But she was rural too. She loved long and solitary country walks, and although she had no knowledge of horticulture, agriculture or wild animals, she enjoyed the queer shapes and sounds of the countryside, the flight of birds and a fox’s bark. Thus we find her and Adrian spending the Christmas of 1906 in a cottage in the New Forest, the following summer in a rented house at Rye in Sussex, and in 1908 she took lodgings by herself at Wells in Somerset and revisited Manorbier in Wales.
She kept in touch by letter writing. Even after the telephone became easily available, the letter was her medium. She would write several on most days, of which about a fifth have survived, and I, who edited them in six volumes with Joanne Trautmann, have been rereading them with renewed astonishment at their versatility. She might write three long letters to different correspondents in an evening without repeating a single phrase from one into another. They vary in depth and speed, like a stream now running fast over pebbles, now settling into pools. Their mood is almost invariably cheerful, merry, solicitous. When she gossiped (which was frequently) it was not with malice, but as a caricature. Take, for example, her famous description of her meeting with Henry James in Rye:
He fixed me with his staring blank eye—it is like a child’s marble—and said, “My dear Virginia, they tell me—they tell me—they tell me—that you—as indeed being your father’s daughter nay your grandfather’s grandchild—the descendant I may say of a century—of a century—of quill pens and ink—ink—ink pots, yes, yes, yes, they tell me—ahm m m—that you, that you write in short.” This went on in the public street, while we all waited, as farmers wait for a hen to lay an egg—do they?—nervous, polite, and now on this foot now on that. I felt like a condemned person, who sees the knife drop and stick and drop again.
Virginia was not then the alarming person that she became, unintentionally but inevitably, when she was famous. Meeting her for the first time you might have considered her timid, shy. Such an encounter was recorded by Arnold Bennett when he met her in a Paris café in April 1907: “Young Bell [Clive] was there with his wife, who is a daughter of Leslie Stephen. Another daughter [Virginia] and a son [Adrian] came in. Bell’s wife was slightly attractive; the other daughter not—I mean physically. All seemed very decent, quiet young people, carrying very well the weight of their name,” when that was the very weight that they had succeeded in shaking off. As for their appearance, Bennett’s judgment is contradicted by every contemporary compliment and photograph. He was expecting two pretty girls. He met two sophisticated young women.
Two men fell seriously in love with Virginia. One was Walter Headlam, a lecturer in classics at King’s College, Cambridge, whom she liked well enough to lend him her manuscripts for criticism, but he was old enough to be her father and died quite suddenly in 1908. The other was Hilton Young, the assistant editor of The Economist and an habitué of Thursday Evenings. Virginia played him like a fish, dangling herself like a bait before him, and then withdrawing. Eventually he proposed to her, and she refused him, saying that she could marry nobody but Lytton Strachey. But when Lytton did propose to her in February 1909, she changed her mind twenty-four hours after accepting him, to the evident relief of both of them. “He’s perfect as a friend,” she told Molly MacCarthy, “but he’s a female friend.”