XIII

THE HOGARTH PRESS was still extending its scope without growing to a size that would have monopolized their time or exposed it to a takeover bid from larger publishers. In 1938 John Lehmann, after a brief absence, became an equal partner with Leonard, buying out Virginia’s half share for £3,000 and bringing with him the literary miscellany New Writing which he had founded and edited and which was ideally suited to the press’s tradition. At first the partnership was an uneasy one. When the agreement was signed, Lehmann proposed that they should celebrate the event by drinking a toast, but Leonard grimly replied that he had only cold water in which to drink it. Then Virginia turned down Lehmann’s own novel, and they disagreed about the memorial volume of Julian’s poetry and essays which Quentin was editing. No wonder that Virginia complained to Vanessa, “John is as touchy as a very old spinster whose one evening dress has a hole in the behind,” but it was as much Leonard’s reluctance to share control as John’s touchiness that caused the trouble. However, Lehmann remained Leonard’s partner until 1946, when he left to found his own publishing firm.

Looking back, the Hogarth Press had been a great success. Its history has been admirably written by Professor J. H. Willis of William and Mary College, Williamsburg, and in his concluding chapter he draws up a balance sheet, regarding it first as a business, then as a contribution to English culture. It was not until 1928, when they published thirty-six titles, that the annual profit exceeded £100. It rose to a peak in 1930 with £2,373 (The Edwardians year) and to £2,442 in 1937 with The Years. Virginia and Vita and Sigmund Freud were undoubtedly the main money-spinners. As for the quality of its output, Willis is fully justified in concluding that “Virginia Woolf’s nine major works of fiction and nonfiction, T. S. Eliot’s two volumes of poetry, translations of Freud’s eight best-known books and the translations of Rilke’s poetry in five volumes would make the Hogarth Press an important publisher even if it published nothing else.” In Virginia’s lifetime they published 474 volumes, an impressive contribution to the intellectual life of England between the wars, but surprisingly they had not been able to attract the major Bloomsbury authors apart from Virginia herself. Forster, Strachey, Keynes and Fry were under contract to larger publishers, and Eliot and Plomer abandoned them once the Woolfs had made them famous. It was only out of loyalty to Leonard that Virginia played so large a part for so long, and the emergence of John Lehmann as a partner was a great relief to them both.

Two months after his appointment, they went on holiday to Scotland. It was Virginia’s only visit there apart from a brief trip to Glasgow in 1913. On their drive north they discovered parts of England which she imagined they were the first people ever to explore, particularly the more desolate parts of Northumberland where Hadrian’s Wall runs across the moors. “What the Romans saw, I see,” she wrote. “Miles and miles of lavender-covered loneliness.” In the Highlands she was impressed, as she had been in Ireland, by the emptiness of the land and the poverty of the people, and sudden glimpses of Landseer scenes: “There was one lake, with trees reflected, which I think carried beauty to the extreme point: whether it is expressible, that rapture, I doubt,” but she was writing to Ethel. When writing to Vanessa she curbed expressions of her delight, thinking that Vanessa’s tastes had far surpassed Landseers and that ecstasy of this sort would bore her.

On their return to Sussex, Virginia was involved in the continuing repercussions of Three Guineas, and she again took up, simultaneously, her two new books, the life of Roger Fry and Pointz Hall (published as Between the Acts). She found the novel more enjoyable work than the biography, switching from “assiduous truth” (Fry) to “wild ideas” (Pointz). She was still worried about how to deal with Fry’s wife Helen, who was locked up mad, and his love affair with Vanessa. “What am I to say about you,” she asked her. Should she come out with the truth, or compromise? “Do give me some views: how to deal with love so that we’re not all blushing.” Vanessa replied, “I hope you won’t mind making us all blush. It won’t do any harm, and anyhow, no one’s blushes last long. . . . The only important thing is to tell the truth, for the sake of the younger generation.” Despite this unexceptionable Bloomsbury declaration, Virginia did compromise. In the book she primly referred to the Vanessa-Roger relationship as “their friendship.”

It was like handling three saucepans on the stove simultaneously. Fry and Pointz were alternately brought to the boil, while Three Guineas was left to simmer. It was the latter that caused her most trouble, both for the flood of reviews and letters that it provoked, and because actuality caught up with theory: how was she to respond to the imminence of another European war?

In 1936 she had allowed herself to become involved in a movement called “For Intellectual Liberty,” or FIL. Its membership was very select (Huxley, Wells, Forster, G. E. Moore, Gilbert Murray, Leonard Woolf ), but its aims were uncertain, for it proclaimed “the need for united action in defence of peace, liberty and culture,” without agreeing on what that action should be beyond a vague appeal to governments to disarm and sign a universal treaty of peace. In face of Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia and Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland and Austria, and the involvement of both dictators in the Spanish Civil War, such high-minded manifestos seemed an inadequate response. Were Britain and France to arm or disarm? Resist the dictators or surrender to them? Aldous Huxley, the President of FIL and an outright pacifist, resigned with the excuse that he intended to live in America, and Leonard, his deputy, was on the point of resignation for the opposite reason, that he was unable to persuade FIL or the Labour Party—he was still secretary to its international committee—to support rearmament as the only reaction that would make the dictators pause. “Until the hawk actually has its beak in their flesh,” he groaned, “they will not face them.” The Tories were even worse. “They do a dirty deal with Musso, and call it peace,” he had written to Julian Bell in his most Tacitean manner. England should revert to rapid rearmament and a broad anti-Fascist alliance, including an Anglo-Soviet military pact. The great powers must unite to protect the smaller powers. This was Leonard’s constant theme in the later 1930s and the message of his book The Barbarians at the Gate. It consorted ill with Three Guineas, where Virginia had declared herself an outsider who would have nothing to do with this masculine folly.

It was a difficult situation for her. The two main interests in her life—support for Leonard, and opposition to his most cherished beliefs—had come into conflict. She cosigned a letter to The Times appealing for “sympathetic benevolence” toward the Spanish democrats, and an FIL telegram to the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, which read, “Profoundly deplore reapproachment Mussolini before his troops leave Spain.” This was safe enough. Neither sentiment involved rearmament. Her true feelings were expressed in a letter to Janet Case written from Monk’s House on Christmas Eve 1936:

 

I’m sitting over a log fire with Leonard reading history for his book [After the Deluge], and the black and white spaniel is in its basket beside him. I’m glad to hoick him away from his eternal meetings—Labour Party, Fabian Research, Intellectual Liberty, Spanish Medical Aid—oh dear, how they poach on him—what hours he spends with dirty, unkempt, ardent, ugly, entirely unpractical but no doubt well meaning philanthropists at whom I should throw the coal-scuttle after 10 minutes if I were in his place.

 

Franco’s victory in Spain effectively put an end to FIL, and Virginia tried to face realities. At first she passed Hitler off as “a ridiculous little man,” and his speeches, which resounded by radio through the garden at Rodmell, as the ravings of a lunatic. Then the Munich Pact caught her in a dilemma. “If it is war, then every country joins in: chaos. But it’s a hopeless war this—when we know winning means nothing”. But a week later: “All Europe in Hitler’s keeping. What’ll he gobble next?” Like the great majority of her countrymen and women she was ambivalent. How resist evil except by a greater evil? If Britain and France go to war to save Czechoslovakia, would we carry our people with us? Would we win? Even Kingsley Martin, who almost camped on the Woolfs’ doorstep during the crisis, came to the conclusion, “the strategic value of the Bohemian frontier should not be made the occasion of a world war.” So the inglorious pact signed at Munich, which gave Hitler almost all he wanted (he took the rest), came as an intense relief. Virginia’s letters to Vanessa, who was in France, described the sandbagging, the trench digging, the issue of gas masks, the plans to evacuate children from London, with a mixture of excitement and despair. When it was all over, she summed up her emotions for Ethel Smyth as a “residue of anger and shame, on top of sheer cowardly relief.” Leonard considered that Munich meant “peace without honour for six months.” It is not unfair to Virginia to conclude that she never clarified her mind. Pacifism, and with it the central argument of Three Guineas, had been overtaken by events. When war came a year later, and she expressed her horror, Leonard replied, “Yes, but now it’s come, it’s better to win the war than lose it,” to which Virginia had no reply. Wars can only be won by fighting.

Many friends and relations were dying before war added to their number. After Lytton, Carrington and Roger Fry, she lost George Duckworth, Ka Arnold-Forster, Janet Case, Charles Sanger, Mark Gertler (suicide), Leonard’s mother, Jack Hills and (on the same day) Mitz the marmoset. She still needed the excitements of London. From time to time she complained of the “frizz and fritter” of social life, but even lunch with Lady Colefax could be enjoyable. Colefax was ruthless in her head-hunting and earned the ridicule of her guests, but her parties were carefully composed, to the extent of excluding spouses whom she found uninteresting. On one such occasion, in November 1938, Virginia found herself in company with Max Beerbohm, Somerset Maugham and Christopher Isherwood, and she was careful to record her impressions of them, first in her diary, and then, sharpened, for Vanessa. Beerbohm was “a charmer, rubicund, gay, apparently innocent but in fact very astute and full of airy fantasies.” Maugham was “a grim figure, rat-eyed, dead-man cheeked, unshaven, a criminal I should have said had I met him in a bus.” Isherwood “seemed all agog with amusement, but is a shifty, quick-silver little slip of a creature—very nimble and rather inscrutable and on his guard.” On leaving, Maugham said to her, indicating Isherwood, “that young man holds the future of the English novel in his hands,” a somewhat tactless statement that Virginia seems not to have taken amiss.

She also met Sigmund Freud. The Hogarth Press had been his British publishers since 1924, and now he was a refugee from Austria, living in Hampstead where the Woolfs called on him for tea in January 1939. The visit was not a great success. Virginia described him as “a screwed up, shrunk, very old man [only 82], with a monkey’s light eyes, paralysed spasmodic movements, inarticulate, alert.” He had an old-world courtesy (he solemnly presented Virginia with a narcissus), and Leonard’s impression was of “great gentleness, but behind the gentleness, great strength.” They never saw him again. He died from cancer eight months later.

Bloomsbury was diminishing in importance in Virginia’s life. Her main correspondents were still Ethel Smyth, Vanessa and Vita, and it was curiously Vita’s elder son, Ben, who after the outbreak of war caused her to write him a careful retrospect of its significance. Ben had rather foolishly attacked Bloomsbury, and Fry in particular, for its ineffectual stance against Fascism and social injustice. They had been living in “a fool’s paradise,” he wrote to Virginia. She was fond of Ben, and had asked him to sort out some of Fry’s papers. She answered him in two long letters, for one of which she made a rare draft that also survives, protesting that Bloomsbury had done its best. Keynes had written The Economic Consequences of the Peace; Leonard had alerted us for years to the menace of the dictators; she herself had worked at Morley College and for Women’s Suffrage, and had written Three Guineas. What more could they have done? Lytton by his books, Duncan and Vanessa by their paintings, Roger by his lectures, had opened people’s eyes to new ideas and roused them from cultural apathy. Should they have become active politicians? What was Ben himself doing about it? He was an art historian, and deputy surveyor of the king’s pictures under Kenneth Clark. Was his occupation any less ivory tower than Fry’s had been? Artists do not, cannot, influence events, she said. They must use their gifts to widen understanding and appreciation of the arts. But what’s the use of telling people who left school at the age of fourteen that they ought to enjoy Shakespeare? She had just been lecturing to a working-class audience at Brighton, and sensed a gulf that was almost unbridgeable, but it was not for that reason a matter for shame. Her replies to Ben were more tolerant and logical than his attack, though clearly she was indignant. It was typical of her to end her letter by inviting him to spend his leave at Rodmell.

Her main defense of Bloomsbury and its values was her biography of Roger Fry, published in July 1940. She had not enjoyed the heavy breathing of the Fry family down her neck as she was writing it, and she was not practiced in biography. Nor did she enjoy the advantages enjoyed by the biographer of, say, Virginia Woolf, for whom the main work has already been done by others, the diaries annotated, the letters collected, the arguments for and against astutely marshaled. But she had known her subject intimately, been intimate with his intimates, and had loved him for the three qualities that she chose to emphasize, his charm, his intelligence and his persistence, which in combination had made him a major influence on his generation. Virginia quoted with approval Julian Bell’s comment, “He made one share his pleasure in thinking,” which might be taken as a tribute to Bloomsbury as a whole. He lifted people’s spirits, as when he persuaded businessmen to accept Omega products, telling them, “It is time that the spirit of fun was introduced into furniture and fabrics. We have suffered too long from the dull and the stupidly serious,” or when addressing a wider public at the time of the Post-Impressionist exhibitions, he said, according to Virginia, that “he feared that the art of painting was circling purposelessly among frivolities and was at a dead end. Now he was convinced that it was alive, and that a great age was at hand.” Virginia’s description of Fry’s personality and life, sometimes introducing her own memories of him, but only in the third person (“a friend,” “an admirer”), was alternately taut with meaning or running fresh with pleasure. The review of the book that she most appreciated was by J. T. Sheppard, where he said that Roger Fry was there and not Virginia Woolf. But Leonard was frankly critical. The book was too impersonal, he told her: “It’s merely analysis, not history.” It was the first time that he had ever directly criticized her work. In moments of depression, she considered that it was not a book at all, but “cabinet making.”

Virginia loved Roger Fry for the three qualities that she emphasized in her biography of him, “his charm, his intelligence, and his persistence, which in combination made him a major influence on his generation. He lifted people’s spirits.”