Virginia Woolf

IN SPITE OF these distractions, the ten years before the outbreak of war marked the full flowering of Bloomsbury. In 1982 I lectured about this celebrated group of friends at Austin, Texas, and warned my academic audience that there was a danger that in America they might be overestimating, and we in Britain underestimating, their influence and achievement. Our Virginia, I said, had become their Woolf, and they were not the same person. While for American scholars Bloomsbury still bulks large in the development of twentieth-century ideas on feminism, socialism and pacifism, the British are more cautious, less exclamatory, sometimes downright hostile, looking for the pioneers of these movements more to the Fabians, the Webbs, Wells, Shaw, Marie Stopes, Ethel Smyth, Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Fawcett, who were contemporaries of the Bloomsbury group but by no possible definition members of it. Americans, I said, may inadvertently be molding the Bloomsberries into their preconceived notion of them, and putting into their mouths things that they wish they had said and meant, but didn’t actually say or mean, while we may be dismissing important things that they did say as plagiarisms or platitudes.

If it can be said that a group exists and has an identity, it must hold certain ideas in common and a wish to propagate them. In Bloomsbury I find it hard to define what those ideas were, beyond claiming in the loosest sense that they were more liberated than their predecessors, expressed themselves more frankly, treated women as equals to men and had a respect for intellectual excellence. But that does not amount to a doctrine. Michael Holroyd has pointed out that it is quite untrue that they shared a philosophy or a system of aesthetics, and those who claim that they did, “understand next to nothing of the isolated way in which a work of art is evolved.” Forster’s novels owed nothing to Virginia’s, Strachey’s theory of civilization little to Clive Bell’s. Or take Leonard Woolf’s thinking on international relations, and Keynes’s on economics: in no way could it be said that it was a Bloomsbury way of thinking. There was a little more community of taste in art and music, and negatively they were linked by their indifference to science and religion, as well as by their pacifism in the First World War. Their socialism was tepid: it assumed the perpetuity of the capitalist system and the subordination of the servant class. Virginia’s championship of women’s rights did not extend far down the social scale. She never protested that it was the lot of most women to remain at home and cook their husbands’ dinners. She was anxious that more women of her own class should have the opportunity to become doctors, lawyers, teachers, writers, but she felt no need to argue that secretaries should become directors of their companies if they were clever enough, or that cleaning ladies might by their own efforts rise to become ladies for whom other ladies cleaned.

That is the negative side. More positively it should be emphasized that this small group of men and women exerted in several directions a beneficent influence of which we are the inheritors. Each in his or her own way was attempting the most difficult feat that a man or woman can undertake—to give an art or a doctrine a new shape that survives challenge and ridicule to be accepted as noncontroversial decades later. Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster achieved this by their novels; Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry by their own paintings and advocacy of the French. Lytton Strachey revolutionized biography; T. S. Eliot, poetry; Desmond MacCarthy, literary criticism; Leonard Woolf, international affairs (he wrote the first draft of the Charter of the League of Nations); Keynes, economics. And all of them by their conduct can teach us how to live, how to allocate our time, how to be happy, how to love.

The fascination that these people still exert is partly due to the vast amount of information we have about them. The discovery of their intimacies, the cat’s cradle of their correspondence, generates a vicarious excitement in all who study their works and days. We are privileged to know more about them than any of them knew about the others. They were the first to regard homosexuality as normal; it was a joyful consequence of friendship. If they were unfaithful to each other, their infidelities tended to be permanent and only temporarily resented. Bloomsbury’s greatest legacy, indeed, was their concept of friendship. Nothing—not age, nor success, nor rivalry in art or love, nor different careers and branching intimacies, nor separation for long periods by war, travel or occupation—ever parted these people who first came together when they were young.

There is no doubt that their society was exclusive and alarming. I can just remember what it was like, because once, when I was aged about twelve, I was taken by my mother to a Bloomsbury party. The room was large, smoky and warmed more by excitement than by artificial means. There were divans and carpets, walls painted gaudily like a seraglio, gramophone records on trays and books everywhere. People were sitting on the floor at other people’s feet, and there was much noise and laughter, high pitched and faintly neighing, which ceased suddenly on the arrival of people like us. My mother and I found a corner where we could sit more or less unobserved, and I was given a tomato sandwich. People were jumping up all the time, reaching for a book, peering at a picture. There was an undercurrent of competitiveness, as if everyone had to justify his presence each time afresh. On one such occasion, when Virginia had told one of her funniest stories and the laughter had died down, she turned to a girl of eighteen and said, “Now you tell us a story.” Of course it wasn’t kind. It was not intended to be. Bloomsbury demanded that you catch the ball when it was thrown in your direction and if you missed it, you were not invited again, and didn’t wish to be.

The conversation, kept up a good flow, though it was not very interesting, until at about half past eleven Miss Cole arrived. She went and sat in the long wicker chair with Virginia and Clive on the floor beside her. Virginia began in her usual tone of frank admiration to compliment her on her appearance: “Of course you, Miss Cole, are always dressed so exquisitely. You look so original, so like a seashell. There is something so refined about you coming in among our muddy boots and pipe smoke, dressed in your exquisite creations.” Clive chimed in with more heavy compliments, and then began asking her why she disliked him so much, saying how any other young lady would have been much pleased with all the nice things he had been saying, but she treated him so sharply. At this Virginia interrupted with, “I think Miss Cole has a very strong character,” and so on. . . . The poor woman was the centre of all our gazes, and did not know what to do with herself.

Virginia’s conduct on this occasion was her mordant side. When friends fell ill, or were bereaved, or long absent abroad, or crossed in love, she could show great sympathy. But she never hesitated to lampoon them, put them at jumps which she knew they could not clear, and invent for them situations (“I know what you have been doing this morning; you have been riding a white horse down Piccadilly”) that exposed them to ridicule. Her chaff was not confined to outsiders like Miss Cole. Members of Bloomsbury were ruthless in criticism of each other’s books, pictures and attitudes. The most false of all legends about them is that they were a mutual admiration society. On the contrary, they set themselves standards of integrity and originality so high that they constantly fell short of them, and they said so, without malice, in speech or a flurry of letters. Sometimes their mock insults were direct. Virginia could write to Violet Dickinson, “Adrian thinks he met you today. The lady smiled—was it you or a prostitute?” and Violet was supposed not to mind. They were so keen to amuse each other that they exaggerated their friends’ failings and misfortunes, magnified their own small adventures, and gilded every lily richly. It was an abrasive society, highly stimulating. It was said that the difference between Bloomsbury and Cambridge was that at Cambridge nothing witty was said unless it was also profound, and in Bloomsbury nothing profound was said unless it was also witty. Virginia was largely responsible for this change in mood.

In August 1909 she went with Adrian and Saxon Sydney-Turner to Bayreuth and Dresden, and relieved her boredom by writing acerbic letters to Vanessa. Parsifal was a tedious opera, she thought, “weak and vague stuff,” and Saxon “rather peevish. He hops along humming like a stridulous grasshopper. He clenches his fists, scowls, and stops at once if you look at him.” As for the natives, her xenophobia surfaced again: “I haven’t seen one German woman who has a face; they are puddings of red dough.”

In 1910 Virginia made two political gestures. She was persuaded by Janet Chase to join the Women’s Suffrage Movement, and while she could in no way be described as a militant, she spent hours in the movement’s offices addressing envelopes to indifferent politicians. The campaign had been gaining popular support for years, but the prime minister, Asquith, was a strong opponent, and his refusal to grant the vote to women led to increasing protests and violence. The outbreak of war in 1914 halted the campaign but gained its object. Most women were granted the vote in 1918. Virginia took no further part in the movement, regarding political agitation as foolish, even when she sympathized with its causes and benefited from its results.

It is therefore all the more surprising that she allowed herself to be drawn into the Dreadnought hoax in February 1910. The details have been well recorded by Adrian and Virginia herself, and amplified by their biographers. It was the event that first drew attention to Bloomsbury. Their success in hoodwinking the Royal Navy shocked and amused the public, but few people realized that the hoax was not just the prank of a few mischievous young men and women, but a political and pacifist statement.

The plan was the joint concept of Adrian and his friend Horace Cole (a brother of Annie), who was renowned for his practical jokes. They proposed to expose the navy to ridicule by staging a formal visit by “the Emperor of Abyssinia” to the fleet’s newest and most prestigious battleship, the Dreadnought, then moored in Weymouth harbor. They sent a telegram to the commander in chief, purporting to come from the foreign office, instructing him to receive the emperor and his suite with honor. The conspirators then hired a theatrical costumer to dress them appropriately, Adrian as the British interpreter and Cole as the foreign office official. All the others blackened their faces and wore heavy disguise. Duncan and Virginia were both in robes, turbans and false mustaches. They had themselves photographed, and set off by train for Weymouth, practicing en route a fictional language that they hoped would be taken for something faintly aboriginal.

There are two unexplained puzzles. Why did Virginia consent to take part in this escapade? She was not by nature a practical joker. She had no acting ability. She hardly knew Cole, and Adrian had little influence on her. Vanessa strongly discouraged her. At that stage of her life she had given little thought to the iniquities of armies and navies. But she never regretted taking part, and as late as 1940 lectured on the hoax with amusement and a certain pride. It was a successful lark, and in later life she attributed to it a moral motive than can scarcely have occurred to her at the time.

The second puzzle is why the navy was taken in. The authenticity of the foreign office telegram was never checked, the disguises never penetrated. The party was given a red-carpet welcome at Weymouth, and conducted by launch to the Dreadnought, where the admiral received them on the quarterdeck with his flag commander, William Fisher, Virginia’s cousin (who might well have recognized her and Adrian), and they were shown round the most modern and secret of Britain’s warships. They were offered refreshments, which they declined on religious grounds, but in reality for fear that their makeup might run, and a twenty-one-gun salute, which they generously declared to be unnecessary. Then they returned to London.

Cole, delighted with the success of the hoax, leaked the story to the newspapers. Indeed, there would have been no purpose in it unless it was to become public knowledge. Questions were asked in Parliament, but the fuss was minimal compared to what it would have been today. The most severe punishment suffered by the conspirators was a ceremonial tap on Cole’s and Duncan’s bottoms, inflicted by young officers to restore the navy’s honor. Cole consented to this chastisement on condition that he could tap them back. The only older people to be outraged by the incident were members of the Stephen family and the Fishers.

This incident was in no way responsible for Virginia’s mental breakdown later in that year. She suffered from headaches and insomnia, and seemed once again on the verge of insanity. Visits to Cornwall, Dorset and a rented house near Canterbury failed to restore her. In late June 1910 Dr. Savage advised her to enter a mental nursing home for six weeks, but her condition was not serious enough to prevent her mocking it in letters to Vanessa and her friends. She showed great fortitude, shut up with mad women in a hideous house, while she herself was not mad enough to be unaware of their madness. “I feel my brains, like a pear,” she wrote from her prison, “to see if it’s ripe: it will be exquisite by September.”

After a convalescence in Cornwall and Dorset, it was. She was able to resume work on Melymbrosia, her novel, and give a little time to women’s suffrage. But the main excitement of the autumn, and Bloomsbury’s major prewar claim to fame, was the First Post-Impressionist Exhibition. The guiding inspiration was Roger Fry’s. The Bells had first met him early in the year, and he was captivated by Bloomsbury, as Bloomsbury was by him. He determined to confront English society with the paintings and sculpture of modern French artists whose very names—Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso—were almost unknown in Britain, and with Desmond MacCarthy as his adjutant, he ransacked the studios and galleries of Paris to bring back examples of their work and present them to the public in the Grafton Galleries. The exhibition caused a sensation. The pictures were reviled even by innovative British painters like Walter Sickert. They were called “pornographic,” “the work of madmen.” Laughter mingled with pretended revulsion.

Virginia had little to do with mounting the exhibition, and supported it hesitantly from the sidelines, but it affected her strongly. What the artists were doing in paint (disdaining what Vanessa called the “fatal prettiness” of conventional British art), she intended to pioneer in prose, giving the essence of a person or a place without describing it precisely. As Desmond MacCarthy put it in his introduction to the catalog, “A good rocking horse has often more of the true horse about it than an instantaneous photograph of a Derby winner.” “Art,” said Fry, “is significant deformity.” For example, Duncan Grant’s portrait of Virginia painted at this time, and now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, is unrecognizable as her—it might be a fishwife—but it reflects Virginia’s brooding contemplation, while in Vanessa’s portrait of her, painted in the next year, her left eye is entirely missing. Virginia made no protest. It was a breaking of convention. The fashionable world did not see it like this. The suffragettes, the Dreadnought hoax, and now this exhibition, were all part of a deplorable attack on taste and good manners. When Virginia and Vanessa appeared at the Post-Impressionist Ball dressed in gaudy draperies and very little underneath, it was taken as further proof that the younger generation was inebriated by a passing French fashion.

In April 1911 Vanessa, Clive, Roger Fry and Harry Norton went to Turkey on holiday, and while there, Vanessa fell seriously ill after a miscarriage. Virginia, intensely worried by rumors of her condition, hastened to join them—it was her second visit to Turkey—and brought her sister back by train. Her help was scarcely needed. Fry, not Clive, took control. He was solicitous and amazingly competent. In the process, he fell in love with Vanessa, and she with him. From that moment the Bell marriage was transformed into what her son Quentin has called a “union of friendship.”

Virginia had no lover and no wish for one, and turned down two further offerings of marriage, one from Walter Lamb (Henry’s brother), the other from the diplomat Sydney Waterlow, who was divorcing his wife in the hope of marrying her. In writing to Sydney, Virginia was kind (“I don’t think I shall ever feel for you what I must feel for the man I marry”), but in writing about him, she did not spare him her sharpest ridicule. She needed solitude to complete her book, and bought one half of a Victorian house at Firle, her first venture into the part of east Sussex which was to be her country retreat for the rest of her life. She agreed that “the cottage” was in fact “a hideous suburban villa,” the only ugly house in a pretty village, but that didn’t matter, because when you are inside, you can forget the outside. It was also a good base for walking on the Downs. Here she remained for much of the summer of 1911, revising her novel, and broke off only to stay with Ottoline Morrell, and go camping in Devon with Rupert Brooke, his lover Ka Cox, with Maynard Keynes.