The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (15 page)

Her diary, which she had resumed that January and which ended on 15 February, records, ‘I begin to loathe my kind' (3 January); ‘I do not like the Jewish voice' of Flora Woolf (4 January); and on 9 January, after passing a line of imbeciles, ‘They should certainly be killed.' A noisy quarrel with Leonard broke out at the end of January, which lasted all morning.

What were the emotions that pushed Virginia into madness? Why did she develop mania rather than depression? And why was it ushered in by an hallucinatory encounter with her mother?

Leonard believed the imminent publication (in March) of
The Voyage Out
caused the outburst but there is nothing to suggest she was unduly anxious about the book. She mentions the novel only once in the diary, at the end of January, when she wrote, ‘Everyone, so I predict, will assure me [it] is the most brilliant thing they've ever read, and privately condemn, as indeed it deserves to be condemned,' not an attitude anticipatory of mania.
25

More interesting is why the spectre of Virginia's mother materialised. Hallucinatory figures do not usually appear without cause, in the absence of intoxicants. However mad someone may be, the spectre has to be summoned or provoked into appearing by word or deed which, by association, releases powerful emotions.

There is no record of what the Woolfs were discussing that morning at breakfast; perhaps the move to Hogarth House, talking about her family. Sex was often in Virginia's thoughts at that time. She was fascinated by Lytton Strachey's sister's infatuation with an older married man, ‘the great affair of her life'.
26
She was taking an undue interest in a tumultuous affair Clive had been having with Molly MacCarthy: ‘as I could have foretold, after violent scenes … they have parted'.
27
Three days after the hallucinatory scene, by now calmer but still clearly hypomanic, she told Lytton Strachey:

Let us all subscribe to buy a parrot for Clive. It must be a bold primitive bird, trained of course to talk nothing but filth, and to indulge in obscene gestures … The fowl could be called Molly or Polly.
28

It may be significant that Virginia read
The Wise Virgins
for the first time on 31 January. She records she ‘was made very happy by it', although there is little in the book, other than Leonard's rudeness to his mother, that might have pleased her. She made no reference to Leonard's portrayal of her (Camilla's) sexual inadequacy, although it must surely have disturbed her.

The spectre of her mother created violent distress in Virginia. Julia stood for Victorian standards, female domesticity, a home run by the woman and ruled by the man, a concept long rejected by her daughter. Did Julia's ghost tell her she was a failure as a woman? Did Julia's words merge with Leonard's, that she was frigid and unfit for motherhood? Virginia was angry, yet over the following three days she idealised her marriage: ‘our happiness is wonderful'.
29
It was followed by furious rage against Leonard.

A week after her mother's appearance Virginia erupted into full-blown mania and nurses had to be summoned. She went into a nursing home while Leonard moved into Hogarth House, and joined him there, in the care of four nurses, on 1 April. She was difficult to restrain and talked incessantly, hardly making sense, her voice trailing off into incoherent mumbling. She barely slept, scarcely ate or drank, and resisted violently all attempts to feed and clean her until, growing exhausted, she gradually subsided into stupor. She lay ‘like a stone statue', her lips occasionally moving soundlessly, withdrawn into a world of her own.
30
Three or four days later she slowly began to return to life. She now responded to questions and co-operated with the nurses, but she remained wary of Leonard and bristled whenever he came near.

Over the following two months, Virginia's mood was a mixture of depression and euphoria. Often she was reasonable, but she was also unpredictable, liable to sudden outbursts of violence. Her hostility to Leonard continued and for a time she was so vicious towards him that he dared not enter her room. She said ‘the most malicious and cutting things', which distressed him to breaking point.
31

Very gradually Virginia's anger faded and the symptoms of the illness, although not its memory, ceased. In September she was able to stay at Asham with Leonard and one nurse, and in the New Year she began leading a normal if sheltered life at Hogarth House.

Chapter Ten

Inner and Outer Worlds

After three years of mental illness, Virginia struggled to make sense of the experience. It had been an horrific time yet she had known moments of ‘exquisite happiness',
1
and glimpsed truths about herself and ideas for her writing. It taught her ‘a good deal about what is called oneself',
2
and it gave rise to the ‘poems, stories, profound and to me inspired phrases' which she would develop in the future.
3
She had come to recognise the creative power in her mental depths and that, as a novelist, she needed both inner and outer worlds. As an essayist and reviewer she was placed firmly in reality. As a novelist she had to let herself down, as she put it, into the depths, and return to reality with whatever she found.

Genius needs the subconscious, but whatever comes up is valueless without intellectual discipline. An artist with schizophrenia, never fully in touch with reality or in control of his mind, cannot create in any meaningful sense. Leonard was wrong in his belief that Virginia was never sane. Had she not been sane for most of her marriage she could never have written what she did.

At first she ‘was so tremblingly afraid of my own insanity',
4
that she drew back from exploring her mind, but the desire for ‘goblin fruits' was often strong and she longed for their refreshing taste.
5
In 1917 she began to write
Night and Day.
It was what Leonard called a factual novel, without disturbing material; she deliberately kept off ‘that dangerous ground'. Writing the novel gave her self-confidence and even before she finished, new ideas came bursting into her mind, ‘all in a flash, as if flying, after being kept stone-breaking for months'. There followed ‘The Mark on the Wall', ‘Kew Gardens', ‘The Unwritten Novel', short stories that showed her how she might embody all her ‘deposit of experience in a shape that fitted it'. By January 1920 she had arrived ‘at some idea of a new form for a novel'.
6

She was now secure enough to welcome subconscious sources of inspiration. Many of her works were made up as she lay in bed with depression; ideas effortlessly presented themselves, to be stored for later use. Music, especially the late quartets of Beethoven, could also have this effect, as could walking alone, through the old parts of London, or across the Sussex Downs.

Virginia's need to write was, among other things, to make sense of mental chaos and gain control of madness. Through her novels she made her inner world less frightening. Writing was often agony but it provided ‘the strongest pleasure' she knew.
7

Leonard believed his wife's sensitivity to criticism was liable to make her ill; every time she finished a novel, depression followed. It is true she was sometimes depressed during the proof-reading stage and while waiting for publication, but this was as much due to what was going on in her life as to the novel. Leonard invariably overlooked such stresses; perhaps because he was often involved.

When Virginia started a novel, she was excited but relaxed and usually stable. In the final stages, when she repeatedly revised, she often did become exhausted and depressed. Yet she was never in danger of serious depression from the writing itself. No author becomes mad writing a book, although he may write the book because he is on the brink of madness and subsequently goes mad. Virginia was apprehensive when she completed a novel, but once Leonard praised the work Virginia was able to relax.

After 1916 Virginia saw Leonard in a new light, had ‘a child's trust in Leonard'.
8
He was the strong linchpin, able to control her gyrations, the adored father and maternal protector in one. She gave way to him on anything touching her health, but he was also a trusted friend to whom she could tell everything. No longer had she to hold back her feelings; when she was angry she said so. She was sure of their love. ‘Darling love, I kiss thee', she wrote when he went away for a night to lecture, and promised to eat ‘exactly as if you were here', despite weighing 40 pounds above her normal weight, and being ‘hardly able to toil uphill'.
9
She and Leonard cuddled and kissed but there was no attempt at sexual intercourse. Virginia had chosen her ‘narrow, virginal bed',
10
and Leonard, after being so battered emotionally by Virginia, was unlikely to have wanted to share it.

Leonard loved Virginia, but looked on her as a child, ‘never completely sane',
11
needing to be closely watched and protected. He ensured she maintained her weight, and at the first sign of headache or insomnia made her rest and stop imaginative writing. A sudden flight of fancy in conversation was a warning sign of hypomania, a need for rest and quiet, although often it was no more than Virginia enjoying herself in company. He strove to keep Virginia within the bounds of reality. At his instigation she joined the Richmond Branch of the Women's Co-operative Guild, and for four years she organised guest speakers and presided over monthly meetings at Hogarth House.

It was largely to provide Virginia with a practical occupation as far removed from the imagination as possible that in March 1917 Leonard bought a small hand-printing press and installed it at home – the beginning of the Hogarth Press. The Woolfs taught themselves to print and, by July, were proficient enough to publish the first Hogarth booklet containing a short story by each.

It proved to be a brilliant move. The Press gave Virginia valuable occupational therapy for many years. She came to look on printing and bookbinding and despatching orders as ‘the sanest way of life. If I were always writing I should be like an inbreeding rabbit – my progeny becoming weakly albino'.
12
The Press also had the great advantage, once big enough to publish her books, of removing the need of submitting her work to other publishers. In time it became a lucrative source of income, although as the volume of work increased, so did the demands on the Woolfs' time. As early as 1920 they brought in a part-time manager, the first of several, and a later source of considerable contention.

*   *   *

Leonard's life was intensely busy. He thrived on hard work. At the outbreak of war he was commissioned by the Fabian Society to research the causes of war and its prevention and, working ‘like a dedicated mole', his report as published in 1916. Almost overnight he became an authority on the subject and related issues. That work was followed by another detailed study on
Empire and Commerce in Africa,
which came out in 1920 and led to him becoming the Labour Party's expert on Imperial Affairs and, in 1924, Secretary of the party's Advisory Committee on Imperial questions. Virginia respected his work, although she took little real interest in the politics, and she regretted that Leonard's ‘poetic side' was ‘a little smothered in Blue-book, and organisations'.
13

Leonard's early ambition to write novels had had to be abandoned at the outbreak of the war, and later on he came to recognise he was better suited to writing about politics and world affairs. None of that brought in much money and most of Leonard's income in the early years of marriage, which was supplemented by Virginia's trust income of about £300 a year plus what she earned, came from journalism and reviewing.

Vanessa and Clive had partially separated during Virginia's breakdown. In 1916 Clive was living on his own at Gordon Square, and Vanessa had moved, with her sons, to Suffolk to be near the painter Duncan Grant. She was still very tied to Roger Fry but their sexual relationship had ended, with some bitterness on his part. As Vanessa had recovered from the long drawn-out depression she had become increasingly drawn to Duncan, and when he responded – partly, one suspects, because an affair with Adrian Stephen was finishing and being replaced by one with David Garnett – she fell in love. Duncan and Garnett were fruit picking on a Suffolk farm in the hope of avoiding conscription into the army.

Virginia missed her sister deeply; the stimulation provided by their rivalry, their understanding and affection for each other, the laughter and sense of the absurd – what Leonard called silliness – and the scandalous gossip which set Virginia's fantasies flying. She made Vanessa promise to write at least twice a week, and before long she was badgering her to leave Suffolk and move to Sussex near her.

She and Leonard visited Vanessa in the summer, and at once Virginia felt more alive and her imagination moved into a higher gear. Ideas for
Night and Day
began to form, with Vanessa the model for Katharine Hilbery. ‘It's fatal staying with you, you start so many new ideas', Virginia told her.
14
‘You stimulate the literary sense in me as you say I do your painting.'
15

Leonard never inspired a novel, although he provided Virginia with the outline of several characters – Peter Walsh in
Mrs Dalloway,
Louis in
The Waves
– but, much more important, he gave her the consistent background against which she could develop her writing. Without Leonard there would have been no Virginia Woolf as we know her.

Virginia searched the Sussex countryside and found a farmhouse to rent within easy bicycling distance of Asham, just a mile from Firle; very solid and simple with ‘flat walls in that lovely mixture of brick and flint',
16
the perfect house for Vanessa's needs. It was Charleston. Vanessa needed little persuasion, and when Duncan Grant and David Garnett obtained exemption from military service she moved there with them in October.