VIII

THEN CAME Orlando. Mrs. Dalloway had made Virginia known. To the Lighthouse made her well known. Orlando made her famous.

She was anxious to start on The Waves as soon as she had finished “Phases of Fiction,” which she planned as a short history of English literature, but she put both aside when an idea flashed into her mind. She wrote to Vita:

 

Yesterday morning I was in despair. . . . I couldn’t screw a word from me; and at last dropped my head in my hands, dipped my pen in the ink, and wrote these words, as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando: a Biography. No sooner had I done this than my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas. I wrote rapidly till 12. . . . But listen: suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita; and it’s all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind (heart you have none, who go gallivanting down the lanes with Campbell) . . . shall you mind?

 

Vita did not in the least mind. She was enchanted. But when she came to quote this letter in a broadcast many years after Virginia’s death, she omitted the words “lusts of your flesh” and the reference to Campbell, because although the book in one sense was a hymn of gratitude for all the happiness that Vita had given her, in another was a reproach for deserting her for Mary Campbell, Vita’s new lover. Campbell might be younger and more luscious, but Virginia had the better mind. She would recapture Vita by writing a book about her, so ingenious, so affectionate that Vita would be unable to resist its appeal.

Mary Campbell was the wife of the South African poet Roy Campbell. They had come to live in Vita’s village, and when she discovered them, she invited them to move into the cottage (our cottage, when we were at boarding school), where they could live rent free and Mary could easily slip down the garden path to the main house where Vita lived. She had fallen deeply in love with Mary. In a single night, when Mary was away, she wrote twelve sonnets to her, some of which the Hogarth Press later published. Roy found out about the affair and was furious. Kitchen knives were brandished. Then he threatened to commit suicide. Vita rushed to Virginia and sobbed her heart out. Orlando was one result.

There were other family links. Harold Nicolson had just published Some People, a collection of stories which he had written during lonely evenings in Teheran, developing a new form of fiction, half true, half fantasy, in which real people like Harold himself were put in imaginary situations, and imaginary people in real situations. Virginia was impressed by Harold’s book: he was not as stupid as she once thought. She reviewed it in the New York Herald Tribune under the heading “The New Biography,” and something of its manner crept into Orlando, elaborating his fact-cum-fiction into an elegant arabesque. She would turn Orlando from man into woman halfway through the book, to suggest that human nature, especially Vita’s, is androgynous, “that a woman could be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as strange and subtle as a woman,” as she expressed it in the book itself. Orlando does not change her nature when she changes sex. All the time she is curiously like Vita—competent, audacious, standoffish, often tongue-tied. Virginia also determined to identify Vita with Knole forever, in compensation for losing it. In January 1928, when Virginia was writing the book, Vita’s father, Lord Sackville, died, and it turned into a memorial mass for him and for Vita’s double loss. As a girl, his only child, she could not inherit the house, which she had loved as profoundly as she had loved her father. It passed, with the Sackville title, to her uncle Charles. Orlando would be her consolation. It had turned into something much more than the joke Virginia had first intended.

There was another ingredient to this complex story. Virginia used it as a medium to explore English history and literature. Therefore it must extend over several centuries, beginning with Vita (as a boy) in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and ending with Vita (as a woman) in 1928, the year of publication. She ages 20 years in 350. Virginia did not intend her history or her geography to be taken seriously. St. Paul’s Cathedral is given a dome before the Great Fire of London destroyed its spire; there is no mention whatever of vast events like the Civil War or the American Revolution; the mountains of Wales are visible from the park at Knole. But she made no attempt to conceal the identity of her central character. The book was dedicated to Vita; it contained photographs of her in different guises; and it is full of sly allusions to their personal lives. Orlando drives a four-in-hand as boldly as in real life Vita drove a Ford; Violet Trefusis is reincarnated as a Russian princess, and they meet at the ice carnival on the Thames in 1608 (a scene brilliantly imagined by Sally Potter in her film of the book in 1993); Vita’s rejected lover, Lord Lascelles, becomes inexplicably the Archduchess Harriet; and she discovers Shakespeare sitting with a tankard of beer and a pen in his hands in the servant’s hall at Knole.

It is a fantasy. It is Vita in Wonderland. It is an impressionist picture—you must stand back from it to grasp its meaning. But it was rooted in Knole, where the manuscript is now on public display. While Virginia was writing it, my brother and I went with her more than once to pace the long galleries, and she would ask us, pointing at a picture, “Who’s that? What was she like?” and as we never knew, she would invent a name and a character on the spot, so that we came to guess something of her intention. Nobody, not even Vita, read a word of it until it was in print. Even when they spent a week together in Burgundy shortly before publication, they scarcely mentioned it. Then on October 11, 1928 (which are also the last words of the book), Vita received her specially bound copy. She was almost incoherent with astonishment and delight. Orlando celebrated their love affair—and defused it.