The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (13 page)

Savage dealt with Jim Stephen when Virginia's cousin developed manic depression, and by the time Julia Stephen died he was well acquainted with most of the family. He may even have been asked for advice on Virginia in 1896 although no record of such exists. He treated Virginia through the 1904 breakdown and saw her, both socially and professionally, over the next eight years. Vanessa always went to Savage for help when worried by her sister's mental state. She liked and respected him – as a family friend he would take no fees – but when she herself became depressed in 1911 she consulted a younger, more detached specialist, Maurice Craig, perhaps wisely recognising she was too close to Savage for his professional comfort.

Savage was a competent, if not very imaginative, psychiatrist. His experience was wide, his opinions conventional, in line with those of the older, renowned Henry Maudsley. Although he modified some of his views for the twentieth century he still believed that women had weaker minds than men and ‘cannot be relieved of the duties of motherhood'. Too much education and mental activity were unhealthy for young females, liable to ‘develop into insanity', and they were ‘peculiarly vulnerable to mental illness in puberty, menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth'.

Savage had no doubt that ‘an insane or nervous disposition' could be inherited, and believed that patients from ‘neurotic stock' were liable to go ‘out of their minds'. Marriage should be forbidden to those with a history of periodical mental illness. ‘There is a grave risk in those adolescents who at puberty and with adolescence have periods of depression and buoyancy', he wrote, and advised all those contemplating marriage to someone with such a history to think long and hard before deciding. As a footnote he added, ‘suppression of the facts as to such attacks should really be a ground for declaration of nullity'.
37
He expressed this opinion only one year before his interview with Leonard.

Savage told Leonard that Virginia suffered from ‘neurasthenia, and not manic depressive insanity', and that marriage and children would do her ‘a world of good'.
38
What had happened to his professional consistency and integrity?

The term neurasthenia was introduced by the American neurologist George Beard in 1869, and for a time it was used for all mental illness except insanity. It was seen as a disease of modern civilisation, respectable and lacking the stigma of madness. For some years neurasthenia was an immensely popular diagnosis but by 1912 medical belief in it as an entity was already fast waning, and today it is forgotten.

Savage knew that Virginia had recurring periods of ‘depression and buoyancy' and had been insane, yet he confidently said she suffered from neurasthenia. Had he diagnosed manic depression he would have been obliged to follow his own advice and warn Leonard of the dangers of marriage and the future. As it was he was able to maintain that marriage and children would do Virginia ‘a world of good'. Perhaps he eased his conscience by reflecting that neurasthenia was ‘the soil from which all mental illnesses spring'; but it must have been hard to reconcile his view that ‘marriage should never be recommended as a means of cure … or a relief for so-called neurasthenia' with his advice to Leonard.
39

Did Savage deliberately mislead Leonard? Was he medically negligent? He would be judged so in today's courts, but at the time he may simply have seen himself being economical with the truth. He liked the Stephen family and wanted to see his friend Leslie's daughter fulfilled in marriage and motherhood. He considered she led an undesirable destabilising style of life, and he hoped marriage to a reliable man could be her salvation. His professionalism took second place to his emotions on this occasion and led him to lose his objectivity. It would have been better to have discussed the problem frankly and fully with Leonard. The facts would hardly have stopped Leonard from marrying and he would have responded by trusting Savage thereafter.

Virginia at first was as optimistic about her future health as Savage: ‘I shall never be ill again because with Leonard I get no chance,' she confided to Janet Case.
40
She and Leonard were married on Saturday 10 August at St Pancras Register Office, while a thunderstorm raged prophetically overhead. They spent the weekend at Asham and several days at Holford in the Quantock Hills before embarking on a gruelling tour of Provence and Spain, and thence by boat and train to Italy, finishing up in Venice. They returned to London at the beginning of October.

Chapter Nine

Marriage – The Second Major Breakdown, 1913

The honeymoon was both a success and a failure. They talked a great deal, explored the towns, walked in the mornings and read or wrote in the afternoons. Virginia completed
The Voyage Out.
Leonard finished
The Village in the Jungle
– which Virginia thought ‘amazingly good'
1
– and began
The Wise Virgins.
They were compatible as companions and Virginia enjoyed being ‘chronically nomadic and monogamic'. But sexually their relationship was troubled. Leonard's attempts to make love had brought on ‘such a violent state of excitement' and hysteria ‘that he had had to stop'.
2

Without having been an accompanying fly on the wall it is impossible to know what transpired in the Woolfs' bedroom. One can guess, however, a possible sequence of events. Virginia was anxious and feared Leonard as a sexual lover. Jekyll threatened to become Hyde. Leonard restrained himself, probably for several days. He tried to talk Virginia's fears through and reassure her, but her anxiety was too deep for her to respond rationally and she remained tense. Leonard felt growing exasperation and helplessness. Finally, sometime in the first fortnight, Leonard lost patience and attempted intercourse forcefully. The effect, to judge from Leonard's account, was explosive. Leonard may have partially penetrated, and then ejaculated prematurely and lost his erection in the face of Virginia's hysteria and panic.

Virginia wrote from Spain to her friend Ka Cox on 4 September to say she had lost her virginity, adding:

Why do you think people make such a fuss about marriage and copulation? Why do some of our friends change upon losing chastity? Possibly my great age makes it less of a catastrophe, but certainly I find the climax immensely exaggerated. Except for a sustained good humour (Leonard shan't see this) due to the fact that every twinge of anger is at once visited upon my husband, I might still be Miss Stephen.
3

Leonard's sexual experience had come from Singalese prostitutes and enthusiastic ‘amateurs'. Then he had been concerned mainly with reaching a climax, not with pleasing the woman, and afterwards he had been assailed by a sense of ‘degradation'. Leonard assumed that virgins were naturally cold, but lost their frigidity once aroused in married life. He had no one to discuss sexual problems with. Strachey and Moore were out of the question and Clive Bell, who could have given him good advice, was bitterly jealous; his scurrilous remarks about Leonard had made both Leonard and Virginia angry. Bella might have helped but she was abroad with her husband.

In December, Leonard and Virginia went together to ask Vanessa's advice. Unexpectedly, she was not only unhelpful but made her sister feel humiliated and angry.

I perhaps annoyed her [Vanessa reported to Clive] but may have consoled him [Leonard] by saying that I thought she never had understood or sympathised with sexual passion in men. They were very anxious to know when I had my first orgasm.
4

There is a ring of triumph behind Vanessa's words. After the trouble and hurt Virginia had caused, it must have been gratifying to inform Clive that Virginia was sexually inadequate. Virginia might be the more gifted and clever, but Vanessa was the better woman.

Virginia's sexual rejection of Leonard, in such contrast to their close companionship, affected him profoundly. A partner's resistance stimulates some people, but prolonged and bitter rejection inhibits and eventually takes away desire and a man's potency. By the end of the honeymoon Leonard had probably ceased to be sexually aroused by Virginia, and may even have been impotent in her presence. Certainly all attempts at sexual intercourse were ‘abandoned quite soon'.
5
Lust had been removed from love. Thereafter Leonard seems to have displaced all his sexual drive into work. He never had an affair; and even his relationship with Trekkie Parsons, after Virginia's death, was without sex.

Leonard was ashamed and resentful. He had failed as a man and if that were widely known, he would be ridiculed. Frustration made him restless, which perhaps explains why the honeymoon couple rarely stopped for more than a night or two in any town. When they finally reached Venice, before returning home, Virginia was ill, headachy, exhausted and reluctant to eat. Forced to rest for a week she was content to let Leonard take charge and feed her on ‘buttered toast, cakes and ices'. Leonard was changing from a lustful husband into a maternal protector.

Leonard poured his emotions into
The Wise Virgins,
which he wrote at great speed, as though under pressure.

Harry, Jewish, dissatisfied with his life, is the central character living with his family in suburbia. He meets the gentile sisters Camilla (Virginia) and Katharine (Vanessa), and is drawn to Camilla: fascinating but frightening to young men, possessing purity, coldness, of hills and snow – something that might at any moment break out destructive of you – of her'. Harry can imagine kissing Katharine, but Camilla seems beyond reach: ‘fine ladies and Dresden china don't kiss'. The sisters ‘had no blood in them' and were ‘cold, pale souls'. Harry then switches his attack and pours scorn on his mother, Mrs Davis, who is unambiguously Marie Woolf: ‘a handsome large woman – big curved nose, the curling full lips, great brown eyes, a … sing-song nasal voice – talked trivialities'.
6

Friends and relatives thought badly of Leonard for publishing the novel in 1914, but no amount of criticism would deflect him. Virginia did not read the book until 1915, just before she became manic.

*   *   *

Virginia, despite recurrent headaches, coped with moving house from Brunswick Square to rooms in Clifford's Inn, near Fleet Street, but by January cyclothymic depression was so exacerbating her symptoms that Leonard began keeping a daily record. He told Vanessa of his worries and sought her view on the dangers of Virginia becoming pregnant. The two sisters had in fact recently talked over the question of pregnancy, and perhaps Vanessa had even proffered advice on intercourse. Vanessa was surprised to discover that Leonard had strong objections, for she knew that both Savage and the nursing home matron Jean Thomas thought Virginia would benefit from motherhood. ‘I wonder why Leonard has gradually come to think childbearing so dangerous?', she asked Virginia at the end of January.
7

Leonard had by now convinced himself that Virginia would not ‘be able to stand the strain and stress of childbearing'.
8
He again consulted Savage, who ‘brushed my doubts aside', and Leonard sought other medical advice: Maurice Craig, who was currently treating Vanessa for depression; Maurice Wright whom Leonard had consulted over his familial tremor; and Theo Hyslop, a writer of eccentric articles on women. Maurice Wright agreed with Savage, but Hyslop sat on the fence and suggested delaying a decision. Craig, however, who was by far the best qualified and most impressive of the three, agreed strongly with Leonard. Leonard also saw Jean Thomas, a suggestible woman, and easily persuaded her to change her mind. Leonard, when his mind was made up, was a formidable force and he eventually won Vanessa round to his way of thinking. He had no doubts; the doctors ‘confirmed my fears and were strongly against her having children'.

Virginia now knew that Leonard was determined to stop her having children, although what they discussed between themselves is unrecorded. Leonard reported each new piece of ‘expert' advice but Virginia was too depressed and demoralised to protest. She fell back on fantasy, as when Thoby died, and in April she told Violet Dickinson:

We aren't going to have a baby, but we want to have one, and six months in the country or so is said to be necessary first.
9

Her resentment as buried beneath depression, but she was very angry with Leonard, was he was to discover, and furious with the doctors. Fourteen years later she told a friend, ‘I'm always angry with myself for not having forced Leonard to take the risk in spite of the doctors.'
10

Virginia's desire for children was not deeply rooted. She expressed a wish for them only when she was depressed. Waking in the early hours, tossing and turning, she tormented herself: ‘I wish I were dead … Vanessa. Children. Failure.'
11
She envied Vanessa with her children round her: ‘a little more self-control on my part and we might have had a boy of twelve and a girl of ten.'
12
She took a different line when in high spirits: then she scarcely wanted children; life was too short. She had to write.

She enjoyed Vanessa's children when they were older, especially her niece Angelica, but not over prolonged periods. When her sister asked her to look after her two boys during her last confinement (admittedly it was in the vulnerable month of January), Virginia took to her bed and the boys had to go elsewhere. The presence of children of her own would have hindered Virginia's creative life and been a health hazard.

Leonard was right to doubt Virginia's ability to cope with childbearing. The risk of breaking down in the first two weeks after childbirth is greater – almost 25 per cent more – for a woman who has had an episode of manic depression, or a strong family history of the disease. Profound hormonal changes occur in a woman after delivery: the fall in circulating oestrogen levels affects the neuro-transmitter patterns in the brain and results in varying degrees of depression. Many mothers experience ‘post-natal blues', but these are short-lived. A woman with manic depressive genes is liable to become far more disturbed. Vanessa was depressed after each of her three children, and the chances of Virginia becoming mad after childbirth were high.