Moments of Being

  To return to Anna Hills. She hated women. But I doubt that she was sexually ambitious. I think all she wanted was to rule a little court of well brushed, mildly well-known males; in the decorous, snobbish Victorian manner. She was thankful, I remember she told us, that she had no daughters; and it was plain she detested having us two rather gawky girls to stay. “Your hair’s parted awry”, she said, fixing me with her little black eyes. Fortunately she had three sons; and they were sent to Eton and Oxford. She liked the soft sweet voiced Eustace with his drawl, and his pleasant manners, and his gentle ways, far the best. Jack and she were on very distant terms. Thus it was natural that when he was living alone in Ebury Street, very hard up, very hard worked, stammering, and lonely, that he came to my mother for sympathy. They were very intimate. Indeed Kitty Maxse said, discussing my mother and her masterful ways once: “For instance, how could Mrs Hills have liked it – Jack treating your mother as if she were his?” He was, roughly speaking, affectionate, honest, domestic, and a perfect gentleman. He was a real [countryman] too; not a fake; a passionate countryman. He rode very well; he fished very well; and there was too a vein of poetry in him. Once when we met years later he told me he read every book of new poetry that came out; and thought the young poets (then Siegfried Sassoon; Robert Graves; and de la Mare) every bit as good as the old. He read philosophy too; Nettleship, the Oxford philosopher, had been a kind of god to him. “He was like Christ”, I remember his saying, in his emphatic sententious way, as he tried very laboriously to explain Nettleship’s philosophy; he lent us the book; it was at Warboys that I remember him explaining Plato to me and Nessa and Marny Vaughan.fn39 Gerald, who sat beneath the window, sneered later: “Well, how did the Sunday prayer meeting go off?” But he was not, compared with my own friends, anything but a simple, primitive-minded man. Unlike them, however – was it for this I liked him, yet could never be altogether at my ease with him? – he was an all-round man; without any gift that dominated, he did a great many different things. He was a Gunner. “I have heard of him standing on one foot, driving three horses”, Ethel Dilke wrote when the engagement was public, “and I’ve no doubt he does other things as well.” He was a good solicitor. Doggedly he worked his way high up into the firm of Roper and Whateley; of Whateley he used to tell many stories: “a disgusting man, but in some ways the ablest man I have ever known. He was a great fisherman – so they say. And I like his fishing books.” Politics came later. He was also very deft with his hands. But as I heard my mother tell my father once, he was ‘nothing out of the way’ intellectually. His appearance was in keeping with this rough sketch. He had beautiful brown eyes, a nose with an obstinate knob at the end of it; curious wrinkles, like a dachshund’s, round his retreating chin. (He was of course very fond of dogs.) He stammered, and his stammer made his very positive statements – “A duck must have water” – all the more positive when at last he got them out. We laughed at him and could imitate him as time went on. He was scrupulously clean; he washed all over ever so many times a day, and was scrupulously well dressed, as a Victorian city solicitor; also as a countryman. The word ‘scrupulous’ suggests itself when I think of Jack Hills. He was scrupulously honest, honourable, in the Eton and Balliol sense, but there was more to his scrupulosity than that. He it was who first spoke to me openly and deliberately about sex – in Fitzroy Square, with the green carpet and the red Chinese curtains.fn40 He opened my eyes on purpose, as I think, to the part played by sex in the life of the ordinary man. He shocked me a little, wholesomely. He told me that young men talked incessantly of women; and ‘had’ them incessantly. “But are they—” I hesitated for a word and then ventured “honourable?” He laughed, “of course – of course”, he assured me. Sexual relations had nothing to do with honour. Having women was a mere trifle in a man’s life, he explained, and made not a jot of difference to their honourableness – to their reputation with other men. I was incredibly, but only partially, innocent. I knew nothing about ordinary men’s lives, and thought all men, like my father, loved one woman only, and were ‘dishonourable’ if unchaste, as much as women; yet, at the same time I had known since I was sixteen or so, all about sodomy, through reading Plato. That was Jack’s honesty; and it differed from George’s or Gerald’s. Neither of them would have spoken to any girl as cleanly, humorously, openly, about sex. That quality penetrated to us as children, and he brought too, country life into our distinguished literary, book-loving world. He taught us to sugar trees; he gave us his copy of Morris’s Butterflies and Mothsfn41 over which I spent many hours, hunting up our catches among all those pictures of hearts and darts and setaceous Hebrew characters.fn42 For I had the post of name finder in our Entomological Society; and was scolded severely by Thoby, I remember, for slackness. At dinner one night Gerald disclosed, with his teasing and treacherous laughter, how we had a store of dying insects in old tooth-powder jars at the bottom of the well. Greatly to our relief instead of scolding and forbidding, mother and, I think, father recognised our mania; and put it on a legal basis, bought us nets and setting boards; and indeed she went with Walter Headlamfn43 down to the St Ives public house and bought us rum. How strange a scene – my mother buying rum. She would go round the sugar after we were in bed.

  But to return to Jack – when Stella accepted him, we approved, in our republic, which, though rapidly losing shape, was still in being after mother’s death. The marriage would have been, I think, a very happy marriage. It should have borne many children. And still she might have been alive. Certainly he was passionately in love; she at first passively. And it was through that engagement that I had my first vision – so intense, so exciting, so rapturous was it that the word vision applies – my first vision then of love between man and woman. It was to me like a ruby; the love I detected that winter of their engagement, glowing, red, clear, intense. It gave me a conception of love; a standard of love; a sense that nothing in the whole world is so lyrical, so musical, as a young man and a young woman in their first love for each other. I connect it with respectable engagements; unofficial love never gives me the same feeling. “My Love’s like a red, red rose, that’s newly sprung in June” – that was the feeling they gave; the feeling that has always come back, when I hear of ‘an engagement’; not when I hear of ‘an affair’. It derives from Stella and Jack. It springs from the ecstasy I felt, in my covert, behind the folding doors of the Hyde Park Gate drawing room. I sat there, shielded, being half insane with shyness and nervousness; reading Fanny Burney’s diary; and feeling come over me intermittent waves of very strong emotion – rage sometimes; how often I was enraged by father then! – love, or the reflection of love, too. It was bodiless; a light; an ecstasy. But also extraordinarily enduring. Once I came on a letter from him which she had slipped between the blotting paper – a sign of the lack of privacy in which we lived – and read it. “There is nothing sweeter in the whole world than our love”, he wrote. I put the page down, not so much guiltily, at having pried; but in a quiver of ecstasy at the revelation. Still I cannot read words that give me that quiver twice over. If I get a letter that pleases me intensely, I never read it again. Why I wonder? For fear lest it shall dwindle? This colour, this incandescence, was in Stella’s whole body. Her pallor became lit up, her eyes bluer. She had something of moonlight about her that winter, as she went about the house. “There’s never been anything like it in the world”, I said – or something like it – when she found me awake one night. And she laughed, tenderly, very gently, and kissed me and said, “Oh lots of people are in love as we are. You and Nessa will be one day”, she said. Once she told me, “You must expect people to look at you both”.

  “Nessa”, she said, “is much more beautiful than I ever was” – at twenty-six she spoke of her beauty as a thing of the past. She told Aunt Mary – I think I read this too, nefariously, in some letter in a blotting book, she could only be neat and tidy now; she was to float us on the life of love; to launch us out on the ordinary woman’s life that promised
such treasures. At some party, perhaps Nessa’s first party, a party where she wore white and amethysts perhaps, a party where Desmondfn44 remarked her ‘like a Greek slave’, she was certain that George Boothfn45 had fallen in love, and feared, tenderly foreboding, yet proudly, and gladly, how the Booths would mind if Nessa rejected him. Had Stella lived, the recollection makes me reflect, how different ‘coming out’ and those Greek slave years and all their drudgery and tyranny and rebellion would have been!

  For some reason Stella and Jack’s engagement lasted all the months from July till April. It was a clumsy, cruel, unnecessary trial for them both. Looking back, it seems everything was done without care or consideration, clumsily, wantonly. I conceive that as the months of that long waiting time passed she slowly roused herself out of the numb, frozen state in which mother’s death had left her. At first she found in Jack rest and support; a refuge from all the worries and responsibilities of ‘the family’, relief too from those glooms which father never controlled, and spent on her. Slowly she became more positive, less passive; and asserted Jack’s rights; her desire too for her own house; her own husband; a life, a home of their own. At last the promise, apparently exacted by father, and tacitly accepted, that they were to live on with us after their marriage, an arrangement now incredible but then accepted, became intolerable; and she went up to father one night in his study; and told him so; and there was ‘an explosion’.

  As the engagement went on, father became indeed increasingly tyrannical. He didn’t like the name ‘Jack’, I remember his saying; it sounded like the smack of a whip. He was jealous clearly. But in those days nothing was clear. He had his traditional pose; he was the lonely; the deserted; the old unhappy man. In fact he was possessive; hurt; a man jealous of the young man. There was every excuse, he would have said, had he been asked, for his explosions. And as by this time he had entrenched himself away from all truth, in a world which it is almost impossible to describe, for I know no one now who could inhabit such a world – the engagement was incredibly involved, frustrated, and impeded. At last in April 1897 the marriage took place – conventionally, ceremoniously, with bells ringing, and company collected, and silver engraved wedding invitations, at St Mary Abbots. Nessa and I handed flowers to the guests; father marched up the aisle with Stella on his arm.

  “He took it for granted that he was to give her away”, George and Gerald grumbled. He ignored the fact that they had any claim. No one would have dared to take that privilege from him. It was somehow typical – his assumption; and his enjoyment of the attitude. They went to Italy; we to Brighton. One fortnight was the length of their honeymoon. And directly she came back she was taken ill. It was appendicitis; she was going to have a baby. And that was mismanaged too; and so, after three months of intermittent illness, she died – at 24 Hyde Park Gate, on July 27th, 1897.fn46

  The present. June 19th 1940. As we sat down to lunch two days ago, Monday 17th, Johnfn47 came in, looked white about the gills, his pale eyes paler than usual, and said the French have stopped fighting. Today the dictators dictate their terms to France. Meanwhile, on this very hot morning, with a blue bottle buzzing and a toothless organ grinding and the men calling strawberries in the Square, I sit in my room at 37 M[ecklenburgh] S[square]fn48 and turn to my father.

  My father now falls to be described, because it was during the seven years between Stella’s death in 1897 and his death in 1904 that Nessa and I were fully exposed without protection to the full blast of that strange character. Nessa, when Stella died, was just eighteen; I fifteen and a half. In order to explain why I say “exposed”, and why, though the word is not the right one – but I cannot find one that is – I call him a strange character, I should have to be able to inhabit again the outworn shell of my own childish mind and body. I am much nearer his age now than my own then. But do I therefore ‘understand’ him better than I did? Or have I only queered the angle of that immensely important relationship, so that I shall fail to describe it, either from his point of view or my own? I see him now from round the corner; not directly in front of me. Further, just as I rubbed out a good deal of the force of my mother’s memory by writing about her in To the Lighthouse, so I rubbed out much of his memory there too. Yet he too obsessed me for years. Until I wrote it out, I would find my lips moving; I would be arguing with him; raging against him; saying to myself all that I never said to him. How deep they drove themselves into me, the things it was impossible to say aloud. They are still some of them sayable; when Nessa for instance revives the memory of Wednesday and its weekly books, I still feel come over me that old frustrated fury.

  But in me, though not in her, rage alternated with love. It was only the other day when I read Freudfn49 for the first time, that I discovered that this violently disturbing conflict of love and hate is a common feeling; and is called ambivalence. But before I analyse our relation as father and daughter, I will try to sketch him as I think he must have been, not to me, but to the world at large.

  He was a little early Victorian boy, brought up in the intense narrow, evangelical yet political, highly intellectual yet completely unaesthetic, Stephen family, that had one foot in Clapham, the other in Downing Street. Such is the obvious first sentence of his biography. And as it goes on, it is all so obvious that I cannot bring myself to follow it – how he went to Eton and was unhappy; went to Cambridge and was in his element; was not elected an Apostle, was muscular; coached his boat; and Christian; but shed his Christianity – with such anguish, Fred Maitlandfn50 once hinted to me, that he thought of suicide, and how then, like Pendennis or any other of the Victorian young men of intellect – he was typical of them – took to writing for the papers, went to America; and was, so far as I can see, the very type, or mould, of so many Cambridge intellectuals – like George Trevelyan, like Charlie Sanger, like Goldie Dickinson – whom I knew later. It bores me to write of him, to try to describe him, partly because it is all so familiar; partly because it is a type that for me lacks picturesqueness, oddity, romance. That type is like a steel engraving, without colour, or warmth or body; but with an infinity of precise clear lines. There are no crannies or corners to catch my imagination; nothing dangles a spray at me. It is all contained and complete and already summed up. Of course, I say to myself, I admire them. I go on: I respect them, I say; I admire their honesty, their integrity, their intellect. I have so clear an impression of them on my surface that if I am in the same room with them I feel I know exactly where I am; indeed, if I am in the same room with other types, like Harold Nicolson or Hugh Walpole, I have my Cambridge intellectual yard measure handy; and say silently: How terribly you fall short. How you miss the mark, here and here and here. But at the same time I am seduced; and feel that my measure has been proved faulty. The Harold Nicolsons and the Hugh Walpoles give me colour and warmth; they amuse and stimulate me. But still I do not respect them as I respect George Moore.

  But I can add something to my father’s steel engraving – a violent temper. Even as a child Aunt Annyfn51 told me, he would work himself into such violent rages that – I forget how she finished the sentence, but I think it had something to do with smashing a flower pot in a greenhouse; and nobody – nobody – could control him, she said. This temper that he could not control, and that, considering his worship of reason, his hatred of gush, of exaggeration, of all superlatives, seems inconsistent. It was due, I suppose, to the fact that he was spoilt as a child; because of his nervous delicacy; and that delicacy excused his extreme irritability. But it was also, I guess, the convention, supported by the great men of the time, Carlyle, Tennyson, that men of genius were naturally uncontrolled. And genius when my father was a young man was in full flower. A man of genius meant a man who had fits of positive inspiration; “Ah but,” I can remember my father saying of Stevenson, “he was a man of genius.” Those who had genius in the Victorian sense were like the prophets; different, another breed. They dressed differently; wore long hair, great black hats, capes and cloaks. They were invar
iably “ill to live with”. But it never struck my father, I believe, that there was any harm in being ill to live with. I think he said unconsciously as he worked himself up into one of those violent outbursts: “This is a sign of my genius,” and he called in Carlyle to confirm him, and let himself fly. It was part of the convention that after these outbursts, the man of genius became “touchingly apologetic”; but he took it for granted that his wife or sister would accept his apology, that he was exempt, because of his genius, from the laws of good society. But was he a man of genius? No; that was not alas quite the case. “Only a good second class mind,” he once told me, as we walked around the croquet lawn at Fritham. And he said he might have done well to be a scientist.