Forty-One False Starts (11 page)

In an earlier work,
Bloomsbury
, published in 1968, Quentin confesses to the sin of discretion. “I have omitted a good deal that I know and much more at which I can guess concerning the private lives of the people whom I shall discuss,” he writes in his introduction, and loftily continues, “This is, primarily, a study in the history of ideas, and although the
moeurs
of Bloomsbury have to be considered and will in a general way be described, I am not required nor am I inclined to act as Clio's chambermaid, to sniff into commodes or under beds, to open love-letters or scrutinize diaries.” But when he accepted the commission from Leonard of writing Virginia's life, Quentin—obviously aware that the biographer
is
Clio's chambermaid—bowed to biography's lowering imperatives. He wrote of what his mother and his aunt, respectively, called George Duckworth's “delinquencies” and “malefactions,” and of Gerald Duckworth's as well: of how during Leslie Stephen's final illness George would come to Virginia's bedroom late at night and fling himself on her bed, “cuddling and kissing and otherwise embracing” her, and of how Gerald (according to an early memory of Virginia's) had stood her on a ledge and, to her lifelong shivering distress, had meddled with her privates. Quentin wrote of an unconsummated but serious (and to his mother seriously wounding) flirtation between Clive and Virginia, which developed during the spring of 1908, when Vanessa was in thrall to her first baby, Julian, and Clive and the still unmarried Virginia would take long walks together to get away from Julian's nappies and screams. (The fastidious Clive “hated mess—the pissing, puking and slobbering of little children distressed him very much, so did their noise,” his son writes.) He wrote of Virginia and Leonard's sexual incompatibility. (Like Vanessa, Virginia had initially refused her husband-to-be and, even when she was on the verge of accepting him, had told him of her doubts about “the sexual side of it.” She wrote in a letter of May 1912, “As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments—when you kissed me the other day was one—when I feel no more than a rock.”) Quentin quoted a letter from Vanessa to Clive written a few months after the Woolfs' wedding:

They seemed very happy, but are evidently both a little exercised in their minds on the subject of the Goat's coldness. [Virginia's family nickname was Goat.] Apparently she still gets no pleasure at all from the act, which I think is curious. They were very anxious to know when I first had an orgasm. I couldn't remember. Do you? But no doubt I sympathised with such things if I didn't have them from the time I was 2.

What makes Quentin's biography such a remarkable work—one of the few biographies that overcome the congenital handicaps of the genre—is the force of his personality and the authority of his voice. He is perhaps more a butler than a chambermaid; he is certainly an upper servant. He has been with the family for a great number of years, and he is fiercely, profoundly loyal to it; he knows who are its friends and who its enemies. More important, he knows its members very well. He has carefully studied each of them for years; he has slowly turned their characters over in his mind for years, knowing their idiosyncrasies and weaknesses. He has been privy to their quarrels—the quarrels by which family life is defined and braced—and he has chosen sides, has discriminated and judged. In making his judgments and discriminations, he has picked up certain habits of mind from the family—habits of mind for which the family is famous—together with a certain tone. “The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power.” This statement, though made by E. M. Forster, might have been made by Quentin (or Vanessa or Virginia or Leonard or Clive or Lytton); it expresses the Bloomsbury ethos and is inflected in the Bloomsbury tone. Forster wrote these words in the essay “What I Believe,” in which he also unforgettably said, “If I had to choose between betraying my county and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country,” and held up “an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky.” Here is how Quentin administers justice to the despicable, power-abusing George Duckworth, who fondled Vanessa as well as Virginia, little thinking that he was earning himself a place in literary history as one of its lowest worms:

In later years Virginia's and Vanessa's friends were a little astonished at the unkind mockery, the downright virulence with which the sisters referred to their half-brother. He seemed to be a slightly ridiculous, but on the whole an inoffensive old buffer, and so, in a sense, he was. His public face was amiable. But to his half-sisters he stood for something horrible and obscene, the final element of foulness in what was already an appalling situation. More than that, he came to pollute the most sacred of springs, to defile their very dreams. A first experience of loving or being loved may be enchanting, desolating, embarrassing or even boring; but it should not be disgusting. Eros came with a commotion of leathern wings, a figure of mawkish incestuous sexuality. Virginia felt that George had spoilt her life before it had fairly begun. Naturally shy in sexual matters, she was from this time terrified back into a posture of frozen and defensive panic.

When Quentin judges his family, when he feels that one of its members hasn't behaved well (George wasn't a true family member), he reproves her (or him) as a nineteenth-century novelist might reprove a heroine (or hero)—as Jane Austen reproves Emma, say, when Emma has been thoughtlessly cruel to Miss Bates. This is the tone Quentin adopts in writing of Virginia's flirtation with Clive. He writes with a kind of loving disapproval, he feels that the whole thing was wrong because it was hurtful, but he sympathizes—as Jane Austen sympathized—with the impulse to heedlessly amuse oneself. He also sympathizes with Virginia's feeling of being left out of her sister's life after Vanessa's marriage. “She was not in the least in love with Clive,” Quentin writes, “in so far as she was in love with anyone she was in love with Vanessa . . . It was because she loved Vanessa so much that she had to injure her, to enter and in entering to break that charmed circle within which Vanessa and Clive were so happy and by way of which she was so cruelly excluded, and to have Vanessa for herself again by detaching the husband who, after all, was not worthy of her.”

What makes Bloomsbury of such continuing interest to us—why we emit the obligatory groan when the word is uttered but then go out and buy the latest book about Virginia and Vanessa and Leonard and Clive and Lytton and Roger and the rest—is that these people are so alive. The legend of Bloomsbury has taken on the dense complexity of a sprawling nineteenth-century novel, and its characters have become as real to us as the characters in
Emma
and
Daniel Deronda
and
The Eustace Diamonds
. Other early-modernist writers and artists, whose talents were at least equal to the Bloomsbury talents (except Virginia's), recede from view, but the Bloomsbury writers and artists grow ever more biographically prominent. Were their lives really so fascinating, or is it simply because they wrote so well and so incessantly about themselves and one another that we find them so? Well, the latter, of course. No life is more interesting than any other life; everybody's life takes place in the same twenty-four hours of consciousness and sleep; we are all locked into our subjectivity, and who is to say that the thoughts of a person gazing into the vertiginous depths of a volcano in Sumatra are more objectively interesting than those of a person trying on a dress at Bloomingdale's? The remarkable collective achievement of the Bloomsbury writers and artists was that they placed in posterity's hands the documents necessary to engage posterity's feeble attention—the letters, memoirs, and journals that reveal inner life and compel the sort of helpless empathy that fiction compels.

Toward the end of “A Sketch of the Past,” there is a beautiful and difficult passage about the tendency Virginia has noticed in herself to write about the past in scenes:

I find that scene-making is my natural way of marking the past. A scene always comes to the top; arranged; representative. This confirms me in my instinctive notion—it is irrational; it will not stand argument—that we are sealed vessels afloat upon what it is convenient to call reality; at some moments, without a reason, without an effort, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality; that is a scene—for they would not survive entire so many ruinous years unless they were made of something permanent; that is a proof of their “reality.” Is this liability of mine to scene-receiving the origin of my writing impulse?

At this point, Virginia, like the reader, begins to sense some of the problems with the passage: the confusion between “scene-making” and “scene-receiving” (which is it?) and the wobbliness of the word “reality,” which totters from “what it is convenient to call reality” to plain “reality” to “ ‘reality.' ” “These are questions about reality, about scenes and their connection with writing to which I have no answer; nor time to put the question carefully,” she writes, and adds, “Perhaps if I should revise and rewrite as I intend, I will make the question more exact; and worry out something by way of answer.” Virginia died before she could revise and rewrite the passage, and students of autobiography and biography are still worrying about the subject of “reality” versus reality—the made versus the received. But there is no question that the hyper-reality of the famous scenes in the Bloomsbury legend, like those of classical fiction, derives from a common artistic tradition and from certain technologies of storytelling, by which the wrought is made to appear as if it were the received. We call the tradition realism; the technologies are unnameable.

Virginia wrote “A Sketch of the Past” in spurts, between April 1939 and November 1940, as a diversion from a project that was giving her trouble—her biography of Roger Fry, the critic and painter who had introduced postimpressionist art to England. After writing the passage about scenes, she put the “Sketch” aside for a month, and when she returned to it she felt constrained to add, “Scenes, I note, seldom illustrate my relationship with Vanessa; it had been too deep for ‘scenes.' ”

Virginia and Vanessa's relationship was deep indeed—perhaps the deepest of all the Bloomsbury relationships. But it was not, in fact, impervious to—“too deep for”—Virginia's scenic imagination. In a letter to Violet Dickinson, for example, she gives this picture of Vanessa a month before her marriage, as she observed her in Bath walking down the street arm in arm with Clive: “She had a gauze streamer, red as blood flying over her shoulder, a purple scarf, a shooting cap, tweed skirt and great brown boots. Then her hair swept across her forehead, and she was tawny and jubilant and lusty as a young God.”

It is the implicit comparison between the watcher and the watched, between the fragile and wistful Virginia and the powerful and sexually magnetic Vanessa, that gives the scene its novelistic shimmer. In Virginia's vision of her sister—it gleams out of her letters and diaries—Vanessa is a Kate Coy or Charlotte Stant to her own Milly Theale or Maggie Verver; she has not only the physical magnificence of James's wonderful “bad” heroines, whose robust beauty and splendid bearing so pointedly contrast with the slouching delicacy of the “good” heroines, but also their double-edged single-mindedness. (“You are much simpler that I am,” Virginia wrote to Vanessa in August 1909. “How do you manage to see only one thing at a time? Without any of those reflections that distract me so much and make people call me bad names? I suppose you are, as Lytton once said, the most complete human being of us all; and your simplicity is really that you take in much more than I do, who intensify atoms.”) Although it was Virginia/Milly/Maggie who had wronged Vanessa/Kate/Charlotte in the Clive affair, Virginia never ceased to feel obscurely wronged by her sister; she perpetually compared herself to Vanessa and found herself wanting. In June 1929, when she and Leonard joined Vanessa and Duncan in the South of France, she wrote in her diary of buying furniture and crockery for her country house in England; although it gave her pleasure, it “set my dander up against Nessa's almost overpowering supremacy. My elder son is coming tomorrow; yes, & he is the most promising young man in King's; & has been speaking at the Apostles' dinner. All I can oppose that with is, And I made £2,000 out of Orlando & can bring Leonard here & buy a house if I want. To which she replies (in the same inaudible way) I am a failure as a painter compared with you, & can't do more than pay for my models. And so we go on; over the depths of our childhood.”

In 1926, after going to a show of Vanessa's paintings, Virginia wrote to her sister, “I am amazed, a little alarmed (for as you have children, the fame by rights belongs to me) by your combinations of pure artistic vision and brilliance of imagination.” Of course, it is the parenthetical remark that leaps out of the passage. The fame is a poor thing, a devalued second best to the children. Vanessa is always the alarmingly invulnerable big sister, even though Virginia is capable of condescending to her when she feels particularly provoked. “What you miss [in Clive] is inspiration of any kind,” she complained to Violet Dickinson, adding, “But then old Nessa is no genius.” Vanessa would have been the first to agree; extreme modesty about her intellectual, and even artistic, attainments was one of her outstanding traits—and perhaps only added to her insufferable superiority in the eyes of her sister. In a memoir called “Reminiscences,” addressed to the yet unborn Julian, Virginia shows us Vanessa behaving in girlhood as she would throughout her life: “When she won the prize at her drawing school, she hardly knew, so shy was she, at the recognition of a secret, how to tell me, in order that I might repeat the news at home. ‘They've given me the thing—I don't know why.' ‘What thing?' ‘O they say I've won it—the book—the prize you know.' ”