V.

By * Martha Duffy, * John Skow, *Colin Turnbell

VIRGINIA WOOLF: A BIOGRAPHY

by QUENTIN BELL

534 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

$12.50.

Recently an editor carrying an early copy of this book was nudged in an elevator by a perplexed woman who asked, "Was there a real person called Virginia Woolf? I saw the play but not the movie."

So much for modernism, Bloomsbury, the avantgarde. The once experimental stream of consciousness that James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield pioneered has now been diverted. Still, Edward Albee had good reason to be afraid of Virginia Woolf. She was among the great innovative novelists; she had the enormous courage to trust her private imaginings and to interpret them even though those visions were sometimes insane. In the same sunburst year of 1922 when Ulysses and The Waste Land appeared, she published her first major novel, Jacob's Room. It was hailed for the beauty of its imagery and the uniquely flexible prose that marked all her work.

Despite the fact that she is now less read than several of her mighty contemporaries, Virginia Woolf has always been the subject of conjecture, as well as a tantalizing apparition in countless memoirs. There were her recurring breakdowns and final suicide, theories about her sexual preferences, if any, and above all, tales of London's famous Bloomsbury group.

This excellent biography was written by Virginia Woolf s nephew. The first sentence--"Virginia Woolf was a Miss Stephen"--sets the stance: just a slight bow to a heavy heritage. More important than Bell's style is his detachment, a quality that he certainly did not inherit. The Stephen family was part of the intellectual wing of Britain's upper middle class; Virginia's father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a famous essayist and man of letters. Altogether, they were an excitable clan, idealistic, moralistic, painfully interdependent, swept along by unrecognized currents of passionate attraction that stopped just short of incest.

In Virginia's case, the inchoate tangle of emotion began in the nursery. There were four older half siblings. One girl was totally deranged and eventually was institutionalized. A half brother, George Duckworth, was a handsome lout who began molesting Virginia when he was 19 and she was six. She had two full brothers, Thoby and Adrian, whose departure for the nation's best schools she bitterly resented, and one sister, Vanessa, who was easily the person closest to her throughout her life.

Though everybody recognized early that Virginia was "a genius," the girls' education was random. Their parents taught them the subjects they knew, which meant that Virginia counted on her fingers for life. Clara Pater, Walter's sister, dropped by to dispense a little Greek. Eventually, however, Sir Leslie opened his vast library to his daughters and Virginia's pent-up intellect found release.

Virginia's first breakdown occurred after her mother's death when she was 13, her second after her father's death nine years later. Her grief was maniacal. She found the act of eating obscene. Worst of all, she heard "horrible voices," among them "King Edward VII lurking in the azaleas using the foulest possible language."

But there were many reprieves and new beginnings. Brother Thoby brought his Cambridge friends to visit--Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Desmond McCarthy. It was the nucleus of the notorious Bloomsbury group, but Virginia called them "a great trial; they sit silent, absolutely silent all the time. The worst of it is they have not the energy to go." Others agreed. "Deplorable, deplorable!" cried Family Friend Henry James. "How could Vanessa and Virginia have picked up such friends?"

Eventually the young men found their voices. With one pungent sentence, the inscrutable Strachey could reduce a room to helpless laughter. Vanessa married Clive Bell. Virginia's writing career began with frequent contributions to the Times Literary Supplement. She also began flirting outrageously with her brother-in-law.

Throughout her life all kinds of people fell in love with Virginia--men, women, homosexuals, heterosexuals. She was a singularly lovely woman who attracted garlands of praise. Quentin Bell compares her to a portrait by a 14th century Sienese master, but adds playfully, "with no Correggioscity." To Rebecca West she was "beautiful in a Leonardo way." (The incorrigible West adds, however, that Virginia's toilette was such that she sometimes looked "as if she had been dragged through a hedge backwards.")

Throughout her 20s, Virginia scarcely knew what to do with all her advantages. She was slowly and painfully writing fiction; her first novel, The Voyage Out, did not appear until she was 33. She thought she was desperate for love, marriage and children--the things Vanessa acquired effortlessly. But in her soul there was a lonelier, more disquieting vision: "This vague & dream like world, without love, or heart, or passion, or sex, is the world I really care about." It is a statement of dedication both poignant and terrifying.

When at 30 she finally married Leonard Woolf, a left-wing editor, she learned conclusively that her world was without sex. At various times before and after her marriage, she formed attachments to women that were Sapphic, but probably not overtly lesbian. She thought a husband might remove her dread of sex and make children possible, but one of her worst breakdowns occurred right after the marriage. Her family blamed George Duckworth, but George had laid hands on Vanessa too, and Vanessa led a rich, lighthearted, erotic life.

The Woolfs, who married in 1912, remained affectionate companions and social allies throughout the years. With one simple printing machine they established a publishing house, the Hogarth Press. Virginia became an able compositor. As a writer she received a consistently good press, and because her novels were so close to her private imaginings, she felt a good notice was "a certificate of sanity." With increasing assurance, she began using in conversation the marvelous gifts of perceptiveness that mark character studies like Mrs. Dalloway. Perhaps the culmination of her public life occurred in 1928 when she gave the Cambridge lectures that became A Room of One's Own. Vanessa remembered it as a noisy triumph. Ironically, the book is probably the most read of Virginia's works today. A witty and even-tempered polemic on sexual inequality, it is a basic text of the Women's Liberation movement.

But at about the same time, a diary entry reads, "I watch. Vanessa. Children. Failure. Failure, failure. (The wave rises)." She became again more unstable, and around her tragedy recurred. Vanessa's son Julian went to fight in Spain and was killed. Strachey died. When the World War II bombings began, both Virginia's and Vanessa's London houses were among the first to be demolished. In 1941 Virginia began to hear the hideous voices again.

For the umpteenth time, Leonard tried to save her from the rising wave of madness. But one of the horrors of her tragedy was that with part of her mind she could watch her own deterioration. On March 28 she put a heavy stone in her coat pocket and walked into the river Ouse, leaving her husband a heartbreaking note. "Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V."

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