Queen of the Highbrows

THOUGH THE PAST DECADE and a half has not been distinguished by pioneer literary criticism, it was certainly an age of great literary biographies. A few primary examples come to mind: Richard Elimann's biography of James Joyce (1959). W.J. Bate's of John Keats (1963), Henri Troyat's of Tolstoy (1967) and Leon Edel's of Henry James of which the final volume appeared early in 1972. All are definitive studies and brilliant. Quentin Bell's new biography of the British feminist critic and novelist. Virginia Woolf, while lacking the voluminous scope of some recent works because it intentionally avoids a critical evaluation of her literary output, ranks among the best of the last decade's watershed biographies.

Though a couple of skillful articles treat Virginia Woolf's literary achievements, in general, the literature addressing her as both an artist and a personality is a critical wasteland. Aileen Pippett's mawkishly reverential biography, The Moth and the Star, (1955), was symptomatic of the uncritical enthusiasm Virginia Woolf inspired, and contributed to the adulation with which many students and emancipated women still regard the "high priestess of Bloomsbury."

However, to Quentin Bell, now in his 60's Virginia Woolf was no cult object. Somehow he managed to subsume whatever personal biases he possessed as her nephew, and to conduct a candid, sober inquisition into her personal history, even though in the process he examined members of his immediate family. In the hands of a less positive narrator and a less compassionate judge of exceptional human conduct, the biography-might have suffered from myopic and a tendency towards authoritarianism. Bell, with his memory of his aunt, is privileged to add the leaven of personal recollection to his to his cautious, startling insights.

The exposure of entirely new biographical material relating to Virginia Woolf's childhood has created a sensation. Although some expert critics were alert to the curiously numb, dead patches in her outlook and in her novels, an aspect of her work expressed by an absence of eroticism, few could credibly account for it. Bell's revelation that Virginia endured ritual sexual molestations by her half-brother for years during her childhood is simply the missing link in our understanding of her tenuous sense of her own physical sexuality." The episode seared her mind: forty-five years later she could record. "I still shiver with shame at the memory of my half-brother, standing me on a ledge, aged about 6 or so exploring my private parts." The loathsome violations by a family member undoubtedly were the foundations for her evolution into a self-admitted "sexual coward," and possibly were connected to her first mental breakdown.

VIRGINIA WOOLF'S CHILDHOOD was very early cheated of its innocence by madness, grief and death. As the daughter of the famous, austere Victorian scholar Leslie Stephen, author of The Dictionary of National Biography, and Julia Pattle, a Pre-Raphelite beauty, Virginia watched her father wear out first his wife, then her step-daughter, with his incessant, self-pitying demands that they attend to his comfort. From Bell's account of the Stephen household, it becomes clear how exact an imaginative rendition of her own childhood is the Ramsey menage of To the lighthouse. Her mother's death in 1895, when Virginia was 13, was the first in a series of premature crises. Her half-sister died two years later, through Leslie Stephen lasted until 1904. Virginia's mental health in the wake of all three deaths was dangerously unstable; in 1895 she went stark mad, heard voices, grew depressed, and refused to eat. In 1904, thinking she heard birds singing in Greek and Edward rustling in the azalea hedge, she threw herself from a window.

By 1906, after the shattering, unexpected death of her brother. Virginia's desire to break with a past burdened by precious personal loss was fortified by her willingness to defy Victorian convention. Bloomsburysociety was by now in high swing, Virginia was one of its hostesses, entertaining geniuses destined to fame. Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey, and geniuses contracted to obscurity. Saxon Syndey-Turner. Bell reveals the Virginia of the Bloomsbury period to have irresistible, gay, irreverent, charming, flirtatious and independent. Admidst the libertarian affairs of Bloomsbury Virginia was also earnestly training for her craft. She read omnivorously, took up journalism, practiced writing daily, and attempted to compensate for the lack of formal university education she resented having been denied.

Bloomsbury was the matrix of the labyrinthine personal inter-relations which embroiled Virginia throughout her lifetime. The affections were so complicated that Lytton Strachey, whose 'buggery' as Bell puts it, was well-known, proposed to Virginia in 1909. Though Virginia greatly longed for marriage, she gently cased Strachey out of his offer. From the Bloomsbury salad days also dated Virginia's flirtation with Clive Bell, the husband of her sister Vanessa. Rivalry was always latent between the sisters, and Vanessa's marital happiness was in some sense unbearable to Virginia. Reacting with typically confused feelings of delight and jealousy. Virginia deepened the sisterly tension by her flirtation, which was instrumental in the slow declension of the Bell marriage. It seems incredible, and above all malicious, that Virginia's objective could have been to isolate her sister from the husband she deeply loved.

In 1912, Virginia made what Bell simply calls "the wisest decision in her life." She accepted Leonard Woolf's marriage proposal. For his wife, Leonard surrendered an extremely successful career in Ceylonese colonial administration, and she, in turn, overcame her fears of intimacy for Leonard. Much in the same manner as George Lewes upheld George Eliot so was Leonard indispensable in his wife's career. Without his steady, competent encouragement, she would not have become a major celebrity, and without Virginia to care for, Leonard might have commanded much more of the limelight.

THEY WERE A VERY happily married couple. The geometry of their relationship was based on Virginia's dependence upon Leonard in practical and critical matters, and his need of Virginia, particularly in times of pain and disappointment. How remarkable it is that she ever found in one man Leonard's capacity for intense, irradiating love able to withstand childlessness, madness and the ordinary exasperations of matrimony. Apparently Leonard did not recent Virginia's demands, even though he married her without having been informed by her family that she had twice been insane and once attempted suicide.

According to Bell, the symptoms Virginia exhibited in her mad states were manic-depressive. Any student of A Writer's Diary knows of her precarious mental stability, but most, commentators have hesitated to define her sickness in medical terms. Michelangelo, Samuel Butler, Honore Balzac, and Robert Schumann share with Woolf manic-depressive disorders not unfamiliar to professional creative egos. Interestingly, Bell notes that his subject was never psychoanalyzed, though he doubts such treatment could have lured her.

In his autobiography, Downhill All the Way, Leonard Woolf remembers.

"We used to say that Virginia was continually picking up mental thorns--worries which she could not get rid of--particularly from criticism. She would come to me and say: 'I've got a thorn and we would discuss the thing until we had got the thorn out."

Despair was not the exclusive product of domestic or personal stress. In Virginia's creative method were visible the pleasures and pains of creative activity almost as no other artist has demonstrated them. Her remorse was usually given articular expression, as in this 1911 letter to Vanessa:

"I could not write, and all the devils came out--hairy black ones. To be 29, and unmarried--to be a failure--Childless--insane too, no writer."

One horrifying image recurrently surfaced in her mind during introductory work on a novel, or at the end of a piece. Bell notices that "the fin rising on a wide bland sea," was both a signal of disaster and an admonition that new ideas for another novel were quickening within her subconscious. Virginia's creative ordeal involved such personal expense that Leonard in 1936 was certain if he had not lied to her that The Years was her greatest book, she would have committed suicide.

VIRGINIA MAINTAINED intense relationships with women throughout her life, none of which seemed to have menaced Leonard's emotional balance. They fulfilled certain of her needs for maternal admiration and stability of which her mother's early death deprived her. Most important of these was Virginia's affair of the heart with Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicholson. Bell thankfully cannot conclude that their intimacy involved physical love, though Virginia's reputation as an "aging Sapphist' no doubt derives from her deep attachments to select females. In another relationship with a rival female author. Katharine Mansfield, however. Virginia exposed the malice and narcissism native to her character, qualities she shared with her father. Their friendship was compounded on both sides of feelings of jealousy and attraction. Woolf, with her deep sense of class, occasionally considered Mansfield, who dressed and behaved, she thought, like a tart, only worthy of her pity, though she also admired her art. Most observers, including Bell, agree that as Virginia Woolf's reputation increased, so did her malice.

As her husband records in Downhill All the Way, their middle age suffered "the erosion of life by death," as many of their demon friends died after 1932, including Roger Fry, Julian Bell and Lytton Strachey. The tempo of Virginia's life was made desperate by the threat of a second war. Perhaps the entire Bell biography can be read as the history of a woman's progression towards lunacy. She lived through the Battle of Britain, but fearing the onset of another attack of madness she was convinced would be incurable, she drowned herself in March, 1941.

As a biographer, Bell is not jealous of his own observations. As a result, while treating his subject with considerable dignity, and distant sympathy, his narration often is speculative. The majority of his conjectures are quite credible. At one point in the biography, while attempting to take stock of her character, he writes with humility:

"To know the psyche of Virginia Woolf, and this is what she is in effect asking of a biographer, one would have to be either God or Virginia, preferably God."

The book's first section, treating the period before Virginia Woolf's marriage, responds better than the second part of his method. But his approach spares the biography from being overly prescient or oppressed by unsupportable conclusions.

VIRGINIA WOOLF'S contemporary high reputation as a paradigm of feminine sensibility is often puzzling. She does not emerge from Bell's chronicle as a generous, forgiving, or warm human being, though endlessly fascinating. It is her sister Vanessa who appeals to the reader for the attractive qualities Virginia lacked. Virginia's history dramatized the miseries of a sick person, for, she was, on occasion, as mad as the March Hare. She fought a painful battle against the possibility that the next attack of insanity would paralyze her permanently. Clearly, Virginia Woolf in Bell's biography is quite often piteous.

Perhaps Virginia Woolf's current stature and importance to present-day women derives from exactly the excruciating periods in her career. Bell makes clear her courage and fortitude, as he does her expert sense of her craft. In the end, reading Bell's account shows Virginia Woolf had more emotional resiliency than she has been credited for. As a novelist she succeeded in solving the intellectual challenge writing presented by embodying her sensibility in the only shape capable of expressing it. That she was ignorant of great preserves of human experience is undeniable, but to expect more from her or her fiction than she sought to achieve is like asking Elizabeth Barret Browning to have been Shakespeare, and to have written like Shakespeare. The constant marvel of Virginia Woolf's life is that she was able to have a serene marriage, and to compose so much fiction and criticism, despite her personal frailties.