Virginia Woolf

IN THE EARLY 1930s the Woolfs went on annual holidays abroad. Now that Virginia’s books were earning a higher income, they could afford to travel, and there was always the lure of Vanessa, who spent much of the year with Duncan and her children at Cassis in the south of France. They often went farther afield, Leonard driving their brand-new Lanchester car over the almost empty roads of France. He wrote that Virginia had a passion for traveling, “a mixture of exhilaration and relaxation,” which refreshed her mind with new sights, sounds and smells. She tolerated discomfort, and was never impatient for quicker progress. It was the journey, not the arrival, that mattered, the slower the better. There were stepping-stones on which they could pause awhile—Montaigne’s tower, Joan of Arc’s castle—but they rarely visited a museum and scarcely spoke to anyone but servants in the inns, because Virginia was uncertain of her French, and there was no need.

Her excellence as a traveler is best displayed in the letters and diaries she wrote on a tour of Greece in April 1932. She and Leonard were accompanied by Roger Fry and his sister Margery, the one an authority on classical and Byzantine art, the other on the wild flowers. For Virginia it was her second visit. A quarter of a century earlier she had toured many of the same sites—Athens, Nauplia, Mycenae, Corinth—and Greece was little changed. The country roads were so abominable, often as pitted as torrent beds, that few tourists ventured far from Athens. The emptiness of the mountains and the coast gave Virginia infinite delight. It was like Chaucer’s England, she said, even Homer’s Greece. Her letters and her diary (hardly a phrase repeated from one into the other) were not about the temples and the churches, but about the country and its people. In the diary she made verbal notes, much as a painter might sketch a scene from which to make a finished picture in his studio (“how lovely the pure lip of the sea touching a wild shore, with hills behind, and green plains and red rocks”), but in her letters she took flight, fitting words to images with unequaled virtuosity. To Vita: “We saw the Greek shepherds’ huts in a wood near Marathon, and a lovely dark-olive, red-lipped, pink-shawled girl wandering and spinning thread from a lump of wool.” To Vanessa: “If ever I had a turn towards Sapphism, it would be revived by the carts of young peasant women in lemon, red and blue handkerchiefs, and the donkeys and the kids and the general fecundity and bareness; and the sea; and the cypresses.” To Ottoline Morrell: “Not a bungalow, not a kennel, not a teashop. Pure sea water on pure sand is almost the loveliest thing in the world.” It was a lesson on how to travel, how to observe, and how to describe what you observe, as different from the style of her novels as a Cotman is from a Cézanne. She called it the best holiday of her life, and one reason was that it was arduous. She was blistered by the sun and exhausted by the roads, but her endurance was rewarded by the remoteness of the places they visited. She was moved by their stark simplicity. “I could love Greece as an old woman [she was only fifty] as I once loved Cornwall as a child.”

Another spring holiday, in 1935, was of a very different nature. They drove through Holland, Germany and Austria to Florence and Rome. Leonard had been warned by the foreign office that it was inadvisable for a Jew to visit Germany, and they found every town placarded with anti-Semitic posters. But nowhere were they molested, although in the neighborhood of Bonn they coincided with a visit to the city by Goering, and security was very tight. What might have been ominous attention by the Stormtroopers to Leonard’s unmistakable Hebraic features was diverted by Mitz, his marmoset, who was traveling with them. I remember Mitz. The Woolfs brought him to lunch at Sissinghurst, the house to which we had recently moved from Long Barn, and my father, who had a horror of rodents, was amazed that Leonard could endure the pawing of this ratlike creature round his face and neck. Mitz ruined our lunch party. But the Germans adored him, and they were waved through every barrier with blessings and applause.

Virginia never traveled outside western and southern Europe, apart from her two short visits to northern Turkey before her marriage. Her only interest in the Far East was prompted by Arthur Waley’s translations from the Chinese. She never visited any part of Africa, never flew in an airplane, and never crossed the Atlantic. Although she had two or three invitations to visit America, she never did. She remained as prejudiced against the United States as she would have been against Liberia. Three of her friends were born Americans, Tom Eliot, Logan Pearsall Smith and Ethel Sands, but she counted them as British, unless she was cross with them, when they became Americans again, with all the failings that she associated with that race. “So ugly, so dusty, so dull,” she wrote of two visitors from San Francisco whom she was about to meet for the first time, and when she was introduced to Blanche Knopf, the publisher, all that she could subsequently remember about her were her eyebrows, “picked out so that one pencil of hair remains in the middle of her forehead: the effect is one of perpetual surprise, and to me unpleasing.” May Sarton, the poet and novelist, was “that goose—a pale, pretty Shelley-imitation American girl.” New York meant little more to her than the address of her publisher, Harcourt Brace, and the magazines Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, the generosity of whose cheques she much appreciated. Yale University was only the Yale Review, which in 1932 published her Letter to a Young Poet, but outside the northeast coast she had little conception of what America was really like. When in 1933 Vita and Harold went on a lecture tour of the United States, Virginia wrote to her:

I imagine you sitting on a tight plush seat in a car, with views of the Middle West—an unattractive land, largely sprinkled with old tin kettles—racing across vast slabs of plate glass. The negroes are spitting in the carriage next door, and after 25 more hours, the train will stop at a town like Peacehaven, only 75 times larger, called Balmoralville, where you will get out, and after a brief snack off clams and iced pear-drops with the Mayor, who is called, I should think, Cyrus K. Hinks, you will go to a large Baptist hall and deliver a lecture on Rim-baud.

Her vision of California was equally fantastic. Writing to Hugh Walpole, who was in Hollywood, she imagined: “You are sitting with vast blue plains rolling round you: a virgin forest at your back; a marble city gleaming at your feet; and people so new, so brave, so beautiful and utterly uncontaminated by civilisation, popping in and out of booths and theatres with pistols in their hands and aeroplanes soaring over their heads.” It was as if she considered that an ancient place like Greece must be more virtuous, more estimable, because of its antiquity, than America, which must be brash, unlovable and deficient in all the qualities that she held most dear, just because it was new. She allowed their people no worthwhile literature, no physical evidence of a long tradition, because all these desirable attributes can only be acquired by centuries of effort and suffering. She could fancy herself living in Tuscany, the Dordogne, the Morea, but not conceivably in Maine. It lacked Bloosmbury’s patina.

She told an American student who was writing a thesis about her that the name “Bloomsbury Group” was “merely a journalistic phrase which had no meaning,” and that was becoming increasingly true. Bloomsbury was unraveling. Vanessa considered that it had died with the outbreak of the First World War. Its membership bifurcated, like a river approaching its delta. They now had different careers, different lovers. Keynes was a senior economist, Duncan Grant and Vanessa fashionable painters and decorators, Roger Fry Slade Professor at Cambridge, Desmond MacCarthy the leading literary critic of his day, Eliot professor of poetry at Harvard, Strachey a best-seller, Virginia a genius. Moreover, the Bloomsbury attitudes that had once made them notorious had become commonplace. Women had votes and entered the professions; homosexual love and sex before marriage were tolerated if not yet condoned; censorship of literature was thought old-fashioned; socialism was practiced; the League of Nations existed; the impressionists were accepted, and Diaghilev was the rage. In fact, as Quentin Bell observed in his book about Bloomsbury, “the audacities of one age became the platitudes of the next.” Only their pacifism was not in general found acceptable, and Bloomsbury itself was fast abandoning it as a creed.

They did not correspond or meet as regularly as in the past, but there was still the Memoir Club, and odd meals and visits which reunited individuals for an hour or a day. Monk’s House, for all its discomforts, was a favorite resort, and it was at Charleston that Strachey read aloud the first chapters of Eminent Victorians and Keynes composed his Economic Consequences of the Peace before he moved with his wife to Tilton House, only half a mile away. For Virginia these friendships formed the core of her life. When Lytton died of stomach cancer in 1932, aged only fifty-two, she wrote to Ottoline, “I have got a queer feeling that I’m hearing him talk in the next room—the talk I always want to go on with. I have a million things to tell him, and never shall.” His death was followed within a few weeks by Carrington’s suicide. She thought life unbearable without him. The day after Leonard and Virginia had visited her at Ham Spray, she borrowed a rifle, ostensibly to shoot rabbits, and shot herself. She took six hours to die. Leonard thought her act histrionic, but later generations have come to regard her death as Bloomsbury’s finest gesture, a symbol of their incandescent gift for friendship. Then Roger Fry died, in 1934, two years after his journey to Greece with the Woolfs, and Virginia wrote of him in her diary, “Dignified and honest and large—something ripe and musical about him—and then the fun, and the fact that he had lived with such variety and generosity and curiosity.” She called him “the most intelligent of my friends, profusely, ridiculously, perpetually creative.”

She had diversions to console her for these losses, and some new pleasures—a camera, an inflatable canoe in which she paddled down the Ouse, another pool for Leonard’s garden, a Frigidaire for Monk’s kitchen, Orlando’s new bedroom for herself, learning Italian once more. The literary world wondered what she would write next. Would The Waves be followed by another novel in the same elusive style? She published several essays in a second series of The Common Reader, and then surprised everyone by writing a short novel about a dog. Flush was the title of the book and the name of the dog, which had belonged to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. No topic is more prone to sentimentality than dog and cat stories. People remembered Where’s Master?, a best-selling novel, ostensibly written by Caesar, Edward VII’s dog, which had followed the king’s coffin to the grave. Virginia’s book never pretended that Flush could talk or even think like a human being: but he could observe, and Mrs. Browning would do the talking for him. The book was poetic. Through Flush’s eyes she retold the story of Elizabeth’s elopement with Robert Browning. It was the only work of which Virginia gave me a copy, possibly because it was the only one which a child could be expected to understand. She was not pleased with it. She had started it “to let my brain cool” after The Waves. It was “easy indolent writing,” but as she finished her 30,000 words, she regretted the time she had spent writing them. She told Vita that it was “a foolish, witless joke,” and herself that it was “silly,” at one moment too slight, at the next too serious. Nevertheless, it was a great success, the Book Society choice in England and America. Virginia despised the critics who praised it and the public who bought it, but when Rebecca West called it “a family joke,” she was upset, because she agreed. Her mind was on something larger, The Pargiters, which came to birth four years later as The Years.

Her fame was becoming more of a disability than a reward. It meant constant interruptions—letters from strangers, requests for interviews, photographs, autographs, the tedium, as she expressed it, of “seeing and being seen.” She did not resent visits from friends old and new (Elizabeth Bowen, William Plomer) who understood a writer’s need for solitude, so much as visits from friends of friends who did not. Even Peter Quennell, a poet, critic and biographer of intelligence and merit, was lambasted by Virginia as “a pushing and at the same time wriggling eel,” just because the Woolfs were landed with him as a weekend guest. When Ethel Smyth begged her to come to Woking and meet some of Ethel’s neighbors, Virginia turned on her with a machine gun. How could Ethel imagine for a moment that she had time to spare for “admirers,” that she was flattered by the invitation? “You’ve been thinking I’m that sort of person—that’s how I spend my time, in a rose-coloured teagown, signing autographs.”

Ethel was capable of rallying from a snub in a way that Vita never could, and continued to exert a pressure to which Virginia unexpectedly succumbed, for she was fond of Ethel and admired her pertinacity even when she was the victim of it. Vita, shyer, more reticent in public, and reluctant to intrude on Virginia’s privacy now that she had lost her love, withdrew to Sissinghurst, cultivated her garden, and moved into a new phase of her life, reflecting on the nature of religion, as her poems Solitude and Sissinghurst (the latter dedicated to Virginia) excellently reveal. They were followed by her biographies of Joan of Arc and St. Teresa of Avila. Virginia came three or four times to Sissinghurst with Leonard, but spent only a single night there, in Harold’s bedroom when he was away. Her affection for Vita was summed up in a phrase: “I can’t deny that I have a sort of dying ember in my heart for you.”

Virginia was indifferent to honors. She had accepted the Femina Prize for To the Lighthouse, possibly because she was then relatively unknown. But now that her name was widely canvassed as the protagonist of a new type of fiction, public tributes were thrust upon her and she refused them all. She would not accept from the Crown the Companion of Honour (which Vita did accept for herself), the most enviable award for the arts after the Order of Merit. She refused an honorary degree from Manchester University, writing to the vice chancellor a letter that started, “I need not say how deeply I am honoured . . .” but in her diary she described it as “all that humbug.” More surprising was her refusal to give the Clark Lectures at Cambridge. It was a highly prestigious invitation. Her own father had given the first lectures in 1883, and Virginia was the first woman to be invited to succeed him. Would it not advance the cause of women to accept? But no. Her formal reason for declining was that she had no time: it would take at least a year to prepare the six lectures, and she was anxious to make progress with her novel. But her private reasons were that she considered university lectures “an obsolete practice inherited from the Middle Ages” when books were scarce. Students should read, not listen. To swallow instruction from a lectern is like sipping English literature through a straw. Lectures, she was to proclaim in Three Guineas, only pander to the vanity of the lecturer and stimulate conflict between academics. What’s more, there would probably be a reception after each lecture. Sherry and cocktails would be served, which seemed to her even less palatable than the prunes and custard at Newnham. “It is a vain and vicious system,” she declared, but she knew that to utter such heresies at Cambridge would be an intolerable breach of manners. So she refused.

When Walter Sickert asked her to write about his paintings, she consented with misgivings. She was no art critic. Her letters to Vanessa on the subject were full of love and admiration, as were Vanessa’s to her about her novels, but each was wary of the other, fearing to write something inadvertently wounding or foolish. In criticizing the pre-Raphaelites, companions of her father, Virginia was outspokenly hostile. On an exhibition of Edward Burne-Jones’s paintings, she wrote, “The suavity, the sinuosity, the way the private parts are merely clouded—it’s all a romantic dream, which makes me think of Hyde Park Gate.” With Sickert it was a different matter. She had genuinely admired his pictures, but when she met him face to face, she was put off by his vanity and weariness, “his hard little eyes, very old [he was seventy-three], no illusion about his own greatness.” Still, she was committed, and, urged by Vanessa, she wrote a brilliant essay comparing portraiture to biography and coming to the conclusion that painting was the more truthful, although “we cannot penetrate the zone of silence in the middle of every art.” Sickert was delighted. He told her that it was the only criticism of his work worth having. Not surprisingly, said Virginia to herself, as she had praised him throughout. Fry’s and Clive’s verdicts on her essay were more astringent.

It is an example of Virginia’s courtesy and kindness. Although her letters often crossed the borderline, they pricked more than gashed. It was the custom of Bloomsbury to tease. They were all guilty of ridiculing each other. But if someone were in serious trouble, or unlikely to respond to teasing with the tolerance of Ethel Smyth, Virginia would be endearingly sympathetic. An instance is her reply to an American, John Nef, who sent her his two-volume work The Rise of the British Coal Industry. Instead of answering that she greatly looked forward to reading it (the formula recommended by Harold Macmillan, the statesman-publisher), she read it, and thanked him for his “delightful present. . . . I am enjoying your coal much more than all the manuscripts which I should be reading.” The deceit (if it was one) was legitimate. But with her intimates there was no need. She could scold, but more often she encouraged, particularly Vanessa’s children. She sat through Angelica’s interminable school play; she applauded Julian for writing a dissertation on “The Good” in the hope of a fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge; and with Quentin she carried on a merry typewritten correspondence, the speed of her typing keeping pace with the cataract of her ideas.

There was still the problem of being overvisited. Typical of her despair and the humor with which she controlled it was this letter to Ethel Smyth:

Tom Eliot for twenty-four hours solid talk yesterday; Rosamond Lehmann now coming for lunch; Oliver Strachey, tea; Lady Colefax I have refused; must go to London to write about 12th Night. Must write journalism. Must see friends. Have therefore decided from today to give up all other writing in order to see there’s beef for lunch and cakes for tea. Am going to spend all my money on clothes, face powder. . . . Fingers to be red. Toes to be silver. Face to be lifted, nose to be filled with wax. [Signed] V., who gave up literature at the command of her friends.

It was untypical of her to wail in public. But she wrote to the New Statesman a letter which might have been written today on behalf of all celebrities:

Open the dailies and the weeklies. Among the pictures of Atlantic flyers and murderers you will find portraits of well-known people, and by no means all of them public people, but private people, musicians, writers, painters, artists of all kinds. Their homes are photographed, their families, their gardens, their studios, their bedrooms and their writing-tables. Interviews appear: their opinions on every sort of subject are broadcast.

She admitted that the celebrities often succumbed to this treatment out of kindness to a friend. Can she have been so innocent as to imagine that they all disliked it? Ethel, for one, reveled in public attention. Fame is desirable for those without it, not always detestable to those with it. Virginia was quite capable of mocking her own modesty. At the height of her fame she read a paper to the Memoir Club entitled, “Am I a Snob?” She confessed that society fascinated her. She would leave a coroneted letter on top of the pile in the hope that visitors would notice it. She cultivated the aristocracy because they behaved “more naturally” than most people, and she knew that they cultivated her because she was famous. Lady Oxford (Margot Asquith) asked her to write her obituary for The Times because “you are the greatest female writer living.” She did not expect such people to test her intellectually: that was Bloomsbury’s function. “If you ask me would I rather meet Einstein or the Prince of Wales,” she wrote in her memoir, “I plump for the Prince without hesitation.” The type of person she most disliked were climbers. The snobs who look up are even worse than the snobs who look down. As she was neither, she decided that she was not a snob at all. She was simply curious. She liked nailing people down as specimens, like butterflies. Stephen Spender, aged twenty-four, “is a nice poetic youth, big-nosed, bright-eyed, like a giant thrush.” Noël Coward “called me darling, and gave me his glass to drink out of.” Then she would turn suddenly fierce, as when defending Strachey against a man who had called him heartless, “Lytton had more love in his little finger than that castrated cat in the whole of his mangy stringy partless gutless tailess body.” She knew how to be formidable when she chose.

An excellent example of her reaction to new people and new places is provided by her visit to Ireland in 1934 to stay with Elizabeth Bowen. Virginia had first met her with Lady Ottoline two years before, and did not immediately take to her. She was awkward, she stammered and was married to the education officer for the city of Oxford, Alan Cameron, which was no commendation to Virginia, who distrusted officials of all kinds; and she suspected that Elizabeth had modeled her novels on her own. Later, her attitude changed. After the Camerons had moved from Oxford to London, Elizabeth became her literary confidante. Virginia liked The House in Paris (1935) very much indeed, and told her so. It was the start of Virginia’s most successful literary friendship. Unlike Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth provoked no jealousy. And unlike Ethel Smyth, she was neither exclamatory nor an intruder.

It was the Woolfs’ first visit to Ireland, and their curiosity to see the country was greater than their curiosity to see the Camerons, with whom they stayed but a single night. Virginia disliked their house, Bowen’s Court. She called it “pompous and pretentious and imitative and ruined—a great barrack of grey stone, four storeys and basements, like a town-house, high empty rooms.” That was the verdict she entrusted to her diary. In writing to Vanessa she went further: “It’s a great stone box, but full of Italian mantelpieces and decayed 18th-century furniture, and carpets all in holes. However, they insisted on keeping up a ramshackle kind of state, dressing for dinner and so on.” Worst of all, they found as fellow guests Cyril Connolly and his wife, to whom Virginia took an instant dislike: “A less appetizing pair I have never seen out of the zoo.” The house and the company had such a depressing effect on her that she descended to ridicule in order to brighten the conversation. According to Connolly’s account of their miserable evening, “she asked Elizabeth Bowen what ‘unnatural vice’ was, and what acts constituted it, and I sensed that she was a virginal and shy character,” when she was neither.

On escaping from Bowen’s Court they traveled quite extensively through Ireland, and Virginia was entranced by the beauty of the country, its emptiness, its simplicity. She thought it a mixture of Greece, Italy and Cornwall, and, as always, considered buying a small house there, but the idea was short-lived: the landscape was suffused in melancholy, and the houses were either ruined mansions or horrid Victorian cottages. She liked the people. They had a genius for talk. “I can give no notion of the flowing yet formed sentences, the richness and ease of the language. . . . Why aren’t these people the greatest novelists in the world?”

However, when they reached Dublin, she spared no thought for James Joyce, and unexpectedly did not find the city beautiful, when it is one of the loveliest capitals in Europe. Her taste had never been for urban or Palladian architecture. She thought Dublin’s wonderful squares poor replicas of Bloomsbury’s, and its population unsettled, feverish. This was not, as one might expect, due to the rise of the Fianna Fáil under de Valera, but to their poverty and lack of spirit—“no luxury, no creation, no stir, only the dregs of London, rather wishy-washy, as if suburbanised.” “No,” she concluded in her diary, “it wouldn’t do, living in Ireland, in spite of the rocks and the desolate bays. It would lower the pulse of the heart.”

She returned to England with a dose of flu which added to her melancholy, but one should not think of her as normally morose or disapproving. Her usual expression was contemplative, not, like Leonard’s, severe, and when she looked up, it was with a smile brimming with new ideas and phrases. She enjoyed provoking people, but not aggressively. As boys we felt ourselves under observation, but not under scrutiny. Her manner was more courteous than polite. By her laughter she would arouse the laughter of other people, and if she did not thrust herself forward in conversation, nor did she shrink. She wanted people to display their best in her company: innkeepers must be welcoming, intellectuals entertaining, children eager. And she would poke at our silences. When we were throwing fragments of bread to the ducks one day, she said, “How would you describe the noise that the bread makes when it hits the water?” “Splash?” we suggested. “No.” “Splosh?”