Life's the thing

Bevis Hillier

VIRGINIA WOOLF by James King Hamish Hamilton, £25, pp. 699 Icannot claim that Virginia Woolf dan- dled me in my swaddling clothes, but she could have done. On my first birthday (28 March 1941) she put on her fur coat, filled the pockets with stones and drowned her- self in the River Ouse. To give that event a slightly more historic context, a year later Neil Kinnock was born (28 March 1942), two years later Rachrnaninoff died and four years later the last air raid siren of the war wailed across Britain.

Because our life-graphs intersected at this one point, I first flicked to the end of this massive biography, like the reader of a mystery novel who cheats to find out who- dunnit. And this is what Professor King writes of Virginia Woolfs suicide:

She had decided to enter into and become a part of the watery domain which had inspired much of her best writing.

I'm sorry, but to me that smacks of one of Dame Edna Everage's inspired euphemisms. Watery domain, forsooth. Riffling back 600 odd pages to the begin- ning of King's Introduction, we find this:

Virginia Woolf is one of the quintessentially great writers of our century, always attuned to the contradictory nature of what it is to be alive now. She is one of us.

Barry Humphries again. John Lahr, in his 1991 book, Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization: Backstage with Barry Humphries, quotes from a monologue by Humphries' gross, slobbering 'Aus- tralian cultural attaché', Sir Les Patterson:

Elitism and shortfall . . . software, hopefully, archetypal, and quintessential. All of them bonzer little words and handy Down-Under epithets which any possum can use whilst boiling a billy and kicking a few ideas around in his Creative Director's hat. . .

I have some idea what 'quintessentially English' means; but what in tarnation does the resounding 'quintessentially great' mean? As for Virginia Woolfs being 'one of us', if you had to make a list of the ten people from the whole sweep of British his- tory who could least aptly be thus described, she would surely come near the top, along with her friend Vita Sackville- West with her allergy to the tedinf. Vir- ginia might have echoed what Shake- speare's Prince of Arragon says when choosing one of Portia's caskets — 'I will not jump with common spirits, and rank me with the barbarous multitude.' To scotch the 'one of us' idea — by which I assume Professor King implies some uni- versality — you need only turn to his p. 210, where he records Virginia's attend- ing a Women's Co-operative Congress at Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1913.

At this event [he writes], Virginia experi- enced a very limited sympathy for the work- ing-class women whose lives were so very different from her own.

She wrote:

One could not be Mrs Giles of Durham because one's body had never stood at the wash-tub; one's hands had never wrung and scrubbed and chopped up whatever the meat may be that makes a miner's supper . . . Those women did not sign a cheque to pay the weekly bills, or order, over the telephone, a cheap but. . . adequate seat at the Opera.

Quite.

The vaporous opening and high-falutin' ending of the book filled me with, as they say, 'the liveliest apprehensions'. But between these two flourishes is a workman- like biography which, while a little short on graces, gives itself no airs. It is nowhere near such a beguiling read as Quentin Bell's two-volume life (1972, reissued in one volume, 1982). But a great deal has been published about Virginia Woolf since 1972, causing Michael Holroyd to give a more sympathetic reading of her in the revision of his, the mother and father of all Bloomsbury biographies, published this month. King has assimilated all the new material. His critical familiarity with Woolf s works is both a strength and a weakness. It enables him to relate the char- acters and events of her life to the novels. But at the same time you feel he is more interested in the works than in the person behind the works. (I had the same feeling about Adam Sisman's recent life of A. J. P. Taylor.) It is a perfectly tenable view that the writings are of more interest than the writer; but it is hardly the ideal viewpoint for a biographer.

King's grip on the narrative is not always strong. People constantly pop up in the text like jacks-in-the-box, with no preamble, no antecedents. For example, he writes:

The other side of Virginia's sexuality can be seen in her response to the Saxon Sydney- Turner Barbara Hiles Nicholas Bagenal imbroglio.

This is the first time we encounter Nicholas Bagenal. We are told nil about him; but six lines later he becomes 'Nick':

In his typically detached way, Saxon fell in love with [Barbara Hiles], but she then met and fell in love with Nick.

Fuller footnotes than the very basic ones he gives would have enabled King to feed us some rudimentary information about such figures without holding up the story. Too often there is a concertina-ing of events. We are told that in 1911-13 Vir- ginia's sister Vanessa Bell 'drew closer to' the art critic Roger Fry. The phrase could mean just affectionate friendship; but five lines later we find Vanessa instructing 'her lover [Fry] to exercise caution'. No slip between cup and lip, there! Sometimes this concertina-ing habit of King's distorts the truth. He writes of Virginia's father, (Sir) Leslie Stephen, in her childhood:

Leslie . . . rather perversely became annoyed with the children when they insisted on iden- tifying with the heroes rather than the villains in the tales he told them . . .

This makes Stephen sound an irrational tyrant. But if we go back to the source of this anecdote, which is Virginia Woolf her- self, quoted by F. W. Maitland in The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (1906), we find there was a reason for Leslie's apparently arbitrary displeasure: the hero was not life- like, but the villain was, and Stephen want- ed his children to learn to distinguish the real from the ideal. And Virginia only says he was 'indignant', which is not the same as 'annoyed'. One can be joshingly indignant ('Really, Virginia!') but not joshingly annoyed.

King's book has already caused a mild flutter in the Times Diary and letters columns by its suggestion that Virginia had a lesbian relationship with Vanessa. He leaves the idea hanging as just 'possible'. References in Virginia's letters to her sister to her own need for 'a good petting' or to her being (herself) 'a pleasant enough bed fellow for a short time!' could be merely affectionate hyperbole; more suggestive is a letter of 1916 in which Virginia writes of the pleasure of stealing kisses from Vanes- sa's 'most secluded parts'. Of more central interest is the nature of Virginia's marriage to Leonard Woolf. In 1970 Lord Eccles, who was once Lytton Strachey's accountant, told me of Leonard Woolf, 'We all thought he was incapable of the sexual act.' King's book would not seem to bear that out, but on the other hand he again and again shows Virginia lamenting that she has no children. Woolf apparently chose to accept the opinion of doctors who said that the mentally febrile Virginia should not have babies, rejecting other doctors' views that it would do her a world of good. King, who is generally somewhat dogmatic (`The truth is . ' is a favourite phrase) firmly squashes any notion that Leonard may, like so many other Blooms- bury males, have had homosexual tenden- cies — though he quotes a letter of 1905 in which Leonard admits that he had formerly been in love with Vanessa Stephen because she was like his Cambridge friend, Vanes- sa's brother Thoby Stephen (The Goth') Who died young: She is so superbly like the Goth. I often used to wonder whether [Clive Bell] was in love with the Goth because he was in love with her & I was in love with her, because with the Goth.

King is no doubt right when he corn- ments (as usual, with no 'probably),

This is not a case of repressed homosexuality: by becoming Vanessa's lover he would have formed an alliance with the sister of a man who embodied the highest ideals of friend- ship. In this scheme of things, Eros took a back seat to Agape.

Most people agreed that the marriage of Virginia and Leonard 'worked' — if one can say that of a marriage which ended in the wife's suicide. The do-her-a-world-of- good school thought that children would give her equilibrium and somebody to think about other than herself. Against that, children might have made demands she could not answer: her art took prece- dence over all humans.