Moments of Being

  Then I realised that she had her side; if that were so, of course I was on her side. Confusedly, I wobbled at once from George’s side to her side. But my vagueness and confusion show that I knew very little of the exact state of things; I had not been called in until George had tried other measures – for one thing as Nessa told me later, he had spoken to father; and he, with that backbone of intellect which would have made him, had we lived to be at ease with him, so dependable in serious relations, had said simply; she must do as she liked; he was not going to interfere. That was what I admire in him; his dignity and sanity in the larger affairs; so often covered up by his irritations and vanities and egotisms.

  These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device – a means of summing up and making a knot out of innumerable little threads. Innumerable threads were there; still, if I stopped to disentangle, I could collect a number. But whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past. A scene always comes to the top; arranged; representative. This confirms me in my instinctive notion – it is irrational; it will not stand argument – that we are sealed vessels afloat upon what it is convenient to call reality; at some moments, without a reason, without an effort, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality; that is a scene – for they would not survive entire so many ruinous years unless they were made of something permanent; that is a proof of their “reality”. Is this liability of mine to scene receiving the origin of my writing impulse? These are questions about reality, about scenes and their connection with writing to which I have no answer; nor time to put the question carefully. Perhaps if I should revise and rewrite as I intend, I will make the question more exact; and worry out something by way of answer. Obviously I have developed the faculty, because in all the writing I have done (novels, criticism, biography) I almost always have to find a scene; either when I am writing about a person, I must find a representative scene in their lives; or when I am writing about a book, I must find the scene in their poems or novels. Or is this not quite the same faculty?

  So that was one of the little red buds or thorns, on the skeleton tree; Vanessa was in love with Jack; Jack was absorbing her selfishly; people were talking; and George and Gerald (to a lesser degree) were getting their hackles up. That is one of the aspects of death that is left out when people talk – as father talked – of the message or teaching of sorrow. They never mention its unbecoming side; its legacy of bitterness, bad temper; ill adjustment; and what is to me the worst of all – boredom.

  (15th November 1940) We never spoke, during those unhappy years, of those scenes. (Scenes, I note, seldom illustrate my relation with Vanessa; it has been too deep for ‘scenes’.) Thoby, I imagine, never guessed at their existence. He may have had a vague conception that something, as he would have put it, was ‘up’ between Jack and Vanessa. But his general attitude was aloof – was he not a man? Did not men ignore domestic trifles? – and judicial. From his remote station, as schoolboy, as undergraduate, he felt generally speaking that we should accept our lot; if George wanted us to go to parties, why not? If father – who was not, he once told me, a normal specimen of manhood – wished us to walk, we should. Once at Salisbury, when the Fishers were neighbours, Vanessa, detesting them, and in particular Aunt Mary, who had viciously interfered, writing surreptitious letters addressed to Cope’s studio, criticising her behaviour towards George and Jack – when Vanessa refused to visit them, and cut them in the street, Thoby pronounced one of his rare impressive judgements. He said gruffly it was not right to treat Aunt Mary like that.

  It thus came about that Nessa and I formed together a close conspiracy. In that world of many men, coming and going, in that big house of innumerable rooms, we formed our private nucleus. I visualise it as a little sensitive centre of acute life; of instantaneous sympathy, in the great echoing shell of Hyde Park Gate. The shell was empty all day. In the evening back they would all come; Adrian from Westminster; Jack from Lincoln’s Inn Fields; Gerald from Dents; George from the Post office or the Treasury, back to the focus, the tea table, where Nessa and I presided. The staple day would be spent (after the morning’s work) together. Together we shaped our own angle, and from it looked out at a world that seemed to both of us much the same. Very soon after Stella’s death we realised that we must make some standing place for ourselves in this baffling, frustrating whirlpool. Every day we did battle for that which was always being snatched from us, or distorted. The most imminent obstacle, the most oppressive stone laid upon our vitality and its struggle to live was of course father. I suppose hardly a day of the week passed without our planning together: was he by any chance to be out, when Kitty Maxse or Katie Thynnefn74 came? Must I spend the afternoon walking round Kensington Gardens? Was old Mr Bryce coming to tea? Could we possibly take our friends up to the studio – that is, the day nursery? Could we avoid Brighton at Easter? And so on – day after day we tried to remove the pressure of his tremendous obstacle. And over the whole week brooded the horror, the recurring terror of Wednesday. On that day the weekly books were given him. Early that morning we knew whether they were under or over the danger mark – eleven pounds if I remember right.fn75 On a bad Wednesday we ate our lunch in the anticipation of torture. The books were presented directly after lunch. He put on his glasses. Then he read the figures. Then down came his fist on the account book. His veins filled; his face flushed. Then there was an inarticulate roar. Then he shouted . . . “I am ruined.” Then he beat his breast. Then he went through an extraordinary dramatisation of self pity, horror, anger. Vanessa stood by his side silent. He belaboured her with reproaches, abuses. “Have you no pity for me? There you stand like a block of stone . . .” and so on. She stood absolutely silent. He flung at her all the phrases about shooting Niagara, about his misery, her extravagance, that came handy. She still remained static. Then another attitude was adopted. With a deep groan he picked up his pen and with ostentatiously trembling hands he wrote out the cheque. Slowly with many groans the pen and the account book were put away. Then he sank into his chair; and sat spectacularly with his head on his breast. And then, tired of this, he would take up a book; read for a time; and then say half plaintively, appealingly (for he did not like me to witness these outbursts): “What are you doing this afternoon, Jinny?” I was speechless. Never have I felt such rage and such frustration. For not a word of what I felt – that unbounded contempt for him and of pity for Nessa – could be expressed.

  That, as far as I can describe it, is an unexaggerated account of a bad Wednesday. And bad Wednesdays always hung over us. Even now I can find nothing to say of his behaviour save that it was brutal. If instead of words he had used a whip, the brutality could have been no greater. How can one explain it? His life explains something. He had been indulged, ever since he broke the flower pot and threw it at his mother (whatever the truth of that story, it ran something like that). Delicacy was the excuse then. Later there was the ‘genius’ legend to which I have referred. And first his sister, Carry,fn76 then Minny, then my mother, each accepting the legend, and bowing to it, increased the load for the other. But there are additions and qualifications to be made. To begin with, it is notable that these scenes were never indulged in before men. Fred Maitland thus resolutely refused to believe, though tactfully instructed by Carry, that Leslie’s tempers were more than what he called (in his biography) coloured showers of sparks. If Thoby had given him the weekly books, or George, the explosion would have been minimised. Why then had he no shame in thus indulging his rage before women? Partly of course because woman was then (though gilt with an angelic surface) the slave. But that does not explain the histrionic element in these displays; the breast beating, the groaning, the self-dramatisation. His dependence on women helps to explain that. He needed always some woman to act before; to sympathise with him, to console him (“He is one of those men who cannot live without us,” Aunt Mary whispered to me once. “And it is very nice for us that it should be so.” Coming downstairs arm
in arm with her, I laid that remark aside for further inspection.) Why did he need them? Because he was conscious of his failure as a philosopher. That failure gnawed at him. But his creed, the attitude, that is to say, adopted by him in his public relations, made him hide the need he had for praise; thus to Fred Maitland and to Herbert Fisher he appeared entirely self deprecating, modest, and ridiculously humble in his opinion of himself. To us he was exacting, greedy, unabashedfn77 in his demand for praise. If then, these suppressions and needs are combined, it seems possible that the reason for this brutality to Vanessa was that he had an illicitfn78 need for sympathy, released by the woman, stimulated; and her refusal to accept her role, part slave, part angel, exacerbated him; checked the flow that had become necessary of self pity, and stirred in him instincts of which he was unconscious. Yet also ashamed. “You must think me,” he said to me after one of these rages – I think the word he used was “foolish”. I was silent. I did not think him foolish. I thought him brutal.

  If someone had said to him simply and straightforwardly: “You are a brute to treat a girl like that. . .” what would he have said? I cannot imagine that the words would have meant anything to him. The reason for that complete unconsciousness of his own behaviour is to be found in the disparity, so obvious in his books, between the critical and the imaginative power. Give him a thought to analyse, the thought say of Mill or Bentham or Hobbes, and he is (so Maynardfn79 told me) a model of acuteness, clarity, and impartiality. Give him a character to explain, and he is (to me) so crude, so elementary, so conventional that a child with a box of chalks could make a more subtle portrait. To explain this one would have to discuss the crippling effect of Cambridge and its one sided education. One would have to follow that by a discussion of the writer’s profession in the nineteenth century and the mutilations of intensive brain work. He never used his hands.fn80 And one would have to show how both these influences told upon a nature that was congenitally unaware of music, of art, and puritanically brought up.fn81 All this would have to be considered and its effect in intensifying certain sensibilities and reducing others to atrophy.

  The fact remains that at the age of sixty-five he was a man in prison, isolated. He had so ignored, or disguised his own feelings that he had no idea of what he was; and no idea of what other people were. Hence the horror and the terror of those violent displays of rage. There was something blind, animal, savage in them. Roger Fry said that civilisation means awareness; he was uncivilised in his extreme unawareness. He did not realise what he did. No one could enlighten him. Yet he suffered. Through the walls ofhis prison he had moments of realisation.

  From it all I gathered one obstinate and enduring conception; that nothing is so much to be dreaded as egotism. Nothing so cruelly hurts the person himself; nothing so wounds those who are forced into contact with it.

  But from my present distance of time I see too what we could not then see – the gulf between us that was cut by our difference in age. Two different ages confronted each other in the drawing room at Hyde Park Gate. The Victorian age and the Edwardian age. We were not his children; we were his grandchildren. There should have been a generation between us to cushion the contact. Thus it was that we perceived so keenly, while he raged, that he was somehow ridiculous. We looked at him with eyes that were looking into the future. What we saw was something that is so obvious now to any boy or girl of sixteen or eighteen that it is hardly to be described. But while we looked into the future, we were completely under the power of the past. Explorers and revolutionists, as we both were by nature, we lived under the sway of a society that was about fifty years too old for us. It was this curious fact that made our struggle so bitter and so violent. For the society in which we lived was still the Victorian society. Father himself was a typical Victorian. George and Gerald were consenting and approving Victorians. So that we had two quarrels to wage; two fights to fight; one with them individually; and one with them socially. We were living say in 1910; they were living in 1860.

  Hyde Park Gate in 1900 was a complete model of Victorian society. If I had the power to lift out of the past a single day as we lived it about 1900, it would give a section of upper middle class Victorian life, like one of those sections with glass covers in which ants and bees are shown going about their tasks. Our day would begin with family breakfast at 8.30. Adrian bolted his, and whichever of us, Vanessa or myself, was down would see him off. Standing at the front door, we would wave a hand till he had disappeared behind the bulging wall of the Martins’ house. This hand waving was a relic left us by Stella – a flutter of the dead hand which lay beneath the surface of family life. Father would eat his breakfast sighing and snorting. If there were no letters, “Everyone has forgotten me”, he would exclaim. A long envelope from Barkers would mean of course a sudden roar. George and Gerald would come later. Vanessa disappeared behind the curtain with its golden anchor. Dinner ordered, she would dash for the red bus to take her to the Academy. If Gerald coincided, he would give her a lift in his daily hansom, the same generally; in summer the cabby wore a red carnation. George, having breakfasted more deliberately, would persuade me sometimes to sit on in the three-cornered chair and would tell me scraps of gossip about last night’s party. Then he would kiss me, button up his frock coat, give his top hat a promise with the velvet glove and trot off, handsome, debonair, in his ribbed socks and very small well polished shoes to the Treasury.

  Left alone in the great house, father shut in his study at the top, Lizzie polishing brass stair rods, another maid doing bedrooms, Shag asleep on his mat, while Sophie, I suppose, stood at the back door taking in joints, milk, vegetables from tradespeople in their little carts, I mounted to my room; spread my Liddell and Scott upon the table, and settled down to read Plato, or to make out some scene in Euripides or Sophocles for Clara Pater, or Janet Case.fn82

  From ten to one Victorian society did not exert any special pressure upon us. Vanessa, under the eye of Val Prinsep,fn83 or Mr Ouless, R.A.fn84 or occasionally of the great Sargent himself, made those minute pencil drawings of Greek statues which she brought home and fixed with a spray of odd smelling mixture; or painted a histrionic male model rather like Sir Henry Irving in oils. I read and wrote. For three hours we lived in the world which we still inhabit. For at this moment (November 1940) she is painting at Charleston; and I am writing here in the garden room at Monks House. Nor would our clothes be very different; the skirts a little shorter perhaps. My hair not much tidier then than now; and Vanessa in a blue cotton smock; as no doubt she is at this moment.

  Victorian society began to exert its pressure at about half past four. In the first place, we must be in; one certainly, preferably both. For at five father must be given his tea. And we must be tidied and in our places, she at the tea table, I on the sofa, for Mrs Green was coming; or Mrs Humphrey Ward; if no one came, it was still necessary to be there; for father could not give himself his tea in the society of those days.

  The pressure of society made itself apparent as soon as the bell rang and Lizzie, also dressed in her afternoon black with a white apron, announced the visitor. For then instantaneously we became young ladies possessed of a certain manner. We both still possess that manner. We learnt it partly from remembering mother’s manner; Stella’s manner, and it was partly imposed upon us by the visitor who came in. For the manner in which a young man – say Ronny Normanfn85 – addressed young ladies was a marked manner. The visitors upon that day were, let us suppose, Ronny Norman, Eveline Godley, Elsa Bell and Florence Bishop. We should have first to make conversation. It was not argument, it was not gossip. It was a concoction, a confection; light; ceremonious; and of course unbroken. Silence was a breach of convention. At the right moment, one of us would take father’s trumpet and convey some suitable portion to him. And then, if we could contrive it, the trumpet would be skilfully transferred to Florence Bishop. And our concoction would begin again with Ronny Norman. He would say something about an awfully jolly play; or an awfully jolly pic
ture perhaps. Light remarks about friends were allowed. Elsa Bell, to recall an exact sentence, said in her society way: “My brothers always take off their hats if they meet me in the street.” Light discussion of brothers and their manners followed. At this point father, groaning, would intervene.fn86

  [. . . father would be irritated: Florence Bishop would too and [would] withdraw her unlucky remark – that he looked well; Ronny Norman would ask him if he remembered Mill; he would unbend – for he liked Ronny Norman – and say how he had met Mill with his father in Chelsea.fn87 “Oh dear, these old stories . . .” he would say. Well, the talk had its little steeps and waterfalls – its dangers: but it went something like that: and the whole was enclosed in the Victorian manner. It may have been natural for Ronny Norman, for Eveline Godley, for Miss Bishop. It was not natural for Vanessa or myself. We learned it. We learned it partly from memory: and mother had that manner: it was imposed on us partly by the other side – if Ronny Norman said that, one had to reply in the same style. Nobody ever broke the convention. If you listened, as I did, it was like watching a game. One had to know the rules.]

  We both learnt the rules of the game of Victorian society so thoroughly that we have never forgotten them. We still play the game. It is useful. It has also its beauty, for it is founded upon restraint, sympathy, unselfishness – all civilized qualities. It is helpful in making something seemly out of raw odds and ends. Major Gardner, Mrs Chavasse, and Mr Dutton need some solving to make it into a sociable party. But the Victorian manner is perhaps – I am not sure – a disadvantage in writing. When I read my old Literary Supplement articles, I lay the blame for their suavity, their politeness, their sidelong approach, to my tea-table training. I see myself, not reviewing a book, but handing plates of buns to shy young men and asking them: do they take cream and sugar? On the other hand, the surface manner allows one, as I have found, to slip in things that would be inaudible if one marched straight up and spoke out loud.