From the NewYorkerArchive: The late writer Janet Malcolm on how Virginia Woolf’s sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, transformed a quiet Sussex farmhouse into the backdrop for some of Bloomsbury’s most extraordinary scenes—in life and in art.
If one is to try to record one’s life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.—The legend of Bloomsbury—the tale of how Virginia and Vanessa Stephen emerged from a grim, patriarchal Victorian background to become the pivotal figures in a luminous group of advanced and free-spirited writers and artists—takes its plot from the myth of modernism.
In the annals of Bloomsbury, Thoby’s death, though as brutal and pointless as Julia’s and Stella’s, has not been accorded the same tragic status. Rather, in fact, the annalists have treated it almost as a kind of death of convenience, like the death of a relative who leaves deserving legatees a bequest of such staggering size that his own disappearance from the scene goes almost unnoticed.
After their wedding and honeymoon, in the winter of 1907, Clive and Vanessa took over 46 Gordon Square, and Virginia and Adrian moved to a house in nearby Fitzroy Square. Four years later, on July 3, 1911, another of Thoby’s astonishing Cambridge friends—a “violent trembling misanthropic Jew” who “was as eccentric, as remarkable in his way as Bell and Strachey in theirs”—came to dine with the Bells at Gordon Square; Virginia dropped in after dinner.
The married Vanessa, on the other hand, continued to be drawn to queer society. “Did you have a pleasant afternoon buggering one or more of the young men we left for you?” she wrote to John Maynard Keynes in April, 1914. “It must have been delicious,” she went on. “I imagine you . . . with your bare limbs intertwined with him and all the ecstatic preliminaries of Sucking Sodomy—it sounds like the name of a station.
However, I suppose she knows what she is about, and seemed very happy and eager and almost boisterously in love and I took her an old silver box , and she spoke of having got “a beautiful Florentine teaset” from you. She was evidently happy in the latter, but I winced and ground my teeth when I heard of it.
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.
When Quentin judges his family, when he feels that one of its members hasn’t behaved well , he reproves her as a nineteenth-century novelist might reprove a heroine —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.
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” and the wobbliness of the word “reality,” which totters from “what it is convenient to call reality” to plain “reality” to “ ‘reality.
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.
I visited Charleston last December on an extremely cold, gray day, and immediately felt its Chekhovian beauty and sadness. The place has been preserved in its worn and faded and stained actuality. It is an artist’s house, a house where an eye has looked into every corner and hovered over every surface, considering what will please it to look at every day—an eye that has been educated by Paris ateliers and villas in the South of France and is not gladdened by English prettiness.
The cold brought my thoughts to the winter of 1918-19, when Vanessa was in the house with Duncan and his boyfriend David Garnett—known as Bunny—and Julian and Quentin and her newborn baby by Duncan, Angelica. Much water had gone over the dam since Clive and Vanessa married and lived like great ladies in Gordon Square. Their marriage had effectively ended in 1914.
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